What are the analogies between representation and advertisement?
At what point does critique turn into branding? And what happens when the museum’s proclaimed self-reflexivity begins to mirror the aesthetics of the very systems it pretends to oppose?
The Western art canon, it seems, is a particularly resilient construction. Despite decades of sustained critique, it continues to cling to the rigid frameworks in which it was first established, and which are still deeply entrenched in its narratives of authority, coherence, and exclusion. Since the 1960s, feminist, anti-colonial, and civil rights movements have pried open the cracks in its structures, exposing how art history has been constructed around a Eurocentric fantasy of progress and universality. Artists, activists, and scholars continue not only to record who is left out of the canon but also how it sustains itself through repetition and the persistent performance of neutrality, objectivity, and institutional authority. Over time, critique itself has been absorbed into the very institutions it aims to challenge. Museums and cultural institutions curate their own critical contextualisation. They adopt the language of institutional critique to promote an introspective image that suggests historical accountability, critical awareness, transparency, and inclusion. Dissidence gets subsumed under the institution’s representational repertoire, and gestures toward decentralizing the canon often remain largely performative. Critique serves to represent rather than expose. What happens when criticality becomes another mode of representation, when the rhetoric of antagonism becomes part of the institution’s marketing vocabulary?
Ben Sakoguchi’s solo exhibition “Critical Art Theory” at Gasworks, London, made me return to these questions about the canon and the paradoxes of institutional critique. Opening on July 10, 2025, the show marked the Los Angeles-based artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in the UK. Through a series of meticulously rendered miniature paintings from his ongoing Critical Art Theory series, Sakoguchi dissects the encyclopedic narratives of Western art history, reworking their imagery into a serial tableau where critique and consumption blur. By collapsing the visual languages of the museum, the movie poster, and the advertisement, his work exposes how representation and promotion feed into one another and compels a reconsideration of where, if anywhere, critique still stands independently.
In the Gasworks’ exhibition space, 67 compact paintings line the walls in strict chronological order, starting from 1,000,000 B.C. to the advent of photography in the early 19th century. Each 12 x 12.5-inch canvas contains a grid of miniature paintings of historical “masterpieces” and canonical artworks annotated with pithy headlines, satirical commentary, and cryptic references, reminiscent of comic strips rather than didactic educational captions. The exhibition adopts a classical, almost didactic display format. Paintings are arranged in a strict chronological sequence, posed as a guide for viewers through a linear timeline of art history, from prehistoric cave paintings through the Renaissance up to modern and contemporary art. At first glance, both the hang and Sakoguchi’s engagement with art history appear to mirror the encyclopedic ambition of the Western canon to capture a generalized overview of art history as an attempt at completeness. Entering the exhibition space, the density of details and references feels overwhelming.
By employing strategies of commercial image production, such as grids, reproduction, and labeling, Sakoguchi treats Art History itself as a kind of commodity or advertisement. His imitation of the canon’s encyclopedic structure becomes an exaggerated mimicry, extending its pedagogical order into absurdity and overloading the viewer with information. On closer inspection, this information doesn’t offer coherence. While Sakoguchi’s hijacking of canonical form exposes its exclusions, absurdities, and ideological scaffolding, his annotations and alterations don’t offer any decisive or linear critical voice.
Fig.1
At times solely satirical, as with the headings such as BAD B*TCHES OF THE BAROQUE (2023), or in inserting a quote from the film The Graduate: “Benjamin are you listening….?”. At other times, he becomes surprisingly serious, almost didactic, as with painting #49, “A STAR IS BORN (2023), which focuses on the Italian Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi, most famous for her painting of the biblical scene of Judith slaying Holofernes, which has since become a symbolic depiction of female rage and vengeance. While the painting depicts 9 miniatures of Gentileschi's paintings, it is split in half by a banner reading “A star is born”. Above and below this blazon, Sakoguchi writes: “Our male-only art history has erased the work of women artists. Artemisia Gentileschi is now recognized (in hindsight after centuries of being expunged) as a powerful top-notch painter.”
Searching for a clear intention or line of critique, one is constantly confronted with paradoxes and contradictions. His critique remains both evident and elusive, offering less of a clear argument against canon than provoking reflection on how critique itself has become diffuse, aestheticized, and difficult to locate. Is this a deliberate evasion of resolution, or simply a critique caught in its own reflection, mirroring its own contradictions?
While many attempts to challenge the Western canon within institutional critique discourses and decolonial and intersectional feminist movements demanded recontextualization, commentary on the violence and exclusivity inherent to the majority of Old Master pieces, Sakoguchi seems to move in the opposite direction. Instead of trying to “fix” the canon, he seems to exaggerate its randomness by making masterpieces into blockbusters, image descriptions into punchy headlines, and artists into stylized heroes. One such example is RENAISSANCE ARTISAN BECOMES THE G.O.A.T. (2022). The painting is split into 8 miniatures of Da Vinci paintings and reinterpretations of them, which Sakoguchi develops into what could be regarded as referencing 1970s film posters with perplexing captions such as “Leo Da Vinci: Mission Mona Lisa”, or “Da Vinci’s Demons: Same Genius, New World”.
Sakoguchi’s transformation of paintings into fictional film posters collapses the boundaries between mass media and high art, proposing a reading of the art historical canon constructed through the same narrative and visual strategies used by Hollywood cinema. In reimagining figures like Da Vinci as protagonists in blockbuster-style posters, Sakoguchi exposes the way canonical artists are mythologized as solitary geniuses, heroes whose stories are flattened into marketable, digestible myths. His use of cinematic tropes, such as bold typography, dramatic taglines, and romanticized portraits, mimics the promotional aesthetics of the entertainment industry, suggesting that the art world, too, relies on spectacle and branding to sustain its hierarchies.
In doing so, one could discern a critique of the commodification of the figure of the artist and how cultural memory is shaped less by critical reflection than by the repetition of heroic narratives. Beyond presenting a parody, these posters diagnose the media logic at the heart of canon formation. It seems that rather than contextualizing the art historical encyclopedia Sakoguchi engages with, he is de-contextualizing it further through anachronistic attempts of making masterpieces of art into film posters, adding graphic signifiers evocative of pop culture promotion.
Fig.2
After withdrawing from the art world in the 1970s, Sakoguchi started exhibiting again only recently, through the curator Jacqueline Tarquinio’s efforts to reintroduce his work at POTTS in Alhambra in 2018. His paintings have since gained renewed attention in the United States, even as Sakoguchi himself remains reticent about publicity, declining interviews, and resisting interpretive framing. However, for “Critical Art Theory” he agreed to respond to written questions from the curatorial team, recording a series of video interviews that accompany the show, reflecting on the desires animating his engagement with the Western canon.
In one video interview screened as part of the exhibition, Sakoguchi remarks that he wants to bring “real life” into art history. Sitting in his studio in front of one of his paintings, he recalls: “The way I was taught art history was that it was independent of the real world.”[ 1] Yet the “real life” Sakoguchi brings into art history is hardly an unmediated one. It is a reality saturated with the aesthetics and visual codes of consumer capitalism, its advertisements, movie posters, and entertainment imagery that form the texture of contemporary experience. This slippage between art and commerce echoes what the theorist Gene Ray describes in Towards a Critical Art Theory: “Critical art theory’s first task is to understand how the given art supports the given order. It must expose and analyze art’s actual social functions under capitalism.” [2]
This confrontation with art’s contradictory role might be what becomes the most consistent element in Sakoguchi’s show, collapsing distinctions between historical images, commodity, and critique. Looking to the commercial visual language of advertisement for inspiration has long been a thread running through Sakoguchi’s work. Known for his fascination with the aesthetics of commercial art printing, he draws on these sources not as mere stylistic references but as sites where histories of labor, migration, and empire are inscribed. This becomes particularly evident in his most renowned work, the “Orange Crate Label” series, in which he reimagines the shiny, idealized imagery of early twentieth-century fruit crate labels.
Originally used to market California’s orange industry of the early 20th century—the history of which is deeply entwined with systems of migrant labor in often exploitative conditions—these designs for Sakoguchi become a lens onto the intertwined histories of Los Angeles’s development, the mining economy, and migrant labor. Japanese-American families like Sakoguchi’s were both laborers and small business owners connected to the distribution and sale of these goods. Designed to sell fruit to a growing consumer market, the images obscured these labor histories and presented a sanitized vision of agricultural abundance. Sakoguchi’s “Orange Crate Label” series reclaims and reworks their commercial aesthetics, highlighting their historical realities and linking them to his own family’s biography, including the experience of forced internment during World War II. Born in 1938, Sakoguchi and his family were interned at the Poston War Relocation Center in Arizona following President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. After the war, they returned to San Bernardino to reopen their store, where the orange crates stacked behind the counter shaped the development of his visual experience.
Reading “Critical Art Theory” through this lens makes clear that Sakoguchi’s engagement with commercial aesthetics is less about delivering a pronounced critique of the Western art canon and more about exploring its malleability. Beyond the incorporation of commercial images, his fascination with reproduction, the obsessive seriality of miniature paintings, and the layering and repetition of annotations is striking. By mixing the visual codes of commerce with the language of the canon, Sakoguchi diminishes the aura traditionally ascribed to art history, exposing its constructedness while simultaneously reveling in it. “Critical Art Theory” stages a playful collision between the canon of art history, popular culture, and commercial aesthetics, inviting reflection on how authority, taste, and value are negotiated across visual cultures under capitalism.
Ironically, the show leaves me with a wry impulse: to visit the National Gallery on the weekend, to stare at some Old Masters, and imagine which Hollywood actor might play them in a blockbuster adaptation today. I’m not sure if this can be considered “critical engagement”, but maybe at least it is a form of one that removes the canon from its throne.
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- Footnotes
[1] Transcription from an interview with Ben Sakoguchi, screened at Gasworks London as part of “Critical Art Theory”.
[2] Gene Ray, Towards a Critical Art Theory (Transversal Text, 2007), https://transversal.at/transversal/0806/ray/en last access: 10.09.2025.
Images
Cover: Ben Sakoguchi, Critical Art Theory: Eurocentric Hegemony (one million B.C - 21st century A.D) (#42) "BAROQUE WHITE COLLAR CRIME", 2023. Acrylic on board, maple frame. Courtesy the artist.
Fig.1 Critical Art Theory, Exhibition Shot. Image: Peter Otto
Fig.2 Ben Sakoguchi, Critical Art Theory: Eurocentric Hegemony (one million B.C - 21st century A.D) (#19) "RENAISSANCE ARTISAN BECOMES ROCK STAR", 2022. Acrylic on board, maple frame. Courtesy the artist.
