Skip to content

Urbis has Left the Building:

Urbis has Left the Building: Six Years of the Best Exhibitions in Pop Culture
21 January 2010 to 27 February 2010

Our last ever exhibition as Urbis, Urbis has Left the Building: Six Years of the Best Exhibitions in Pop Culture celebrated what we achieve during our somewhat short lived existence;  our successes of the past six years as we strived to give popular culture a serious platform (and the highs and lows along the way). It paid tribute to our content-rich exhibition programme, encompassing design, fashion, architecture, art, music, our city’s creative community as well as its playful spirit.

Vaughan Allen, Urbis’ Chief Executive, sums up the experience below:

“Strange how potent cheap music is”
Noel Coward, Private Lives

Popular culture changes lives in a way that high culture never can. Yet it is something that is almost impossible to celebrate without losing the essence of what makes it important. There is little more exciting than dancing for 24 hours in a field. There is little more boring than a cultural studies tome analysing why people choose to dance for 24 hours in a field.

Popular culture fails in museums, because museums can’t do Pop. If it’s currently out there, currently happening, it can’t be captured, can’t be stuck in a dusty case. It’s a matter of emotion, of time, of fleeting experiences. The essence of popular music is not to be found by flicking through vast databases of family trees, or by looking at the ‘actual’ guitar that Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock; it’s about emotional connections. It’s about shared memories, shared communities and a guarding of secret knowledge.

Yet popular culture is important . Vital. It deserves to be treated with respect. It is a culture that’s created, constructed and influenced by everyone.

Over the course of six years, Urbis developed a new way of exhibiting popular culture. We took a step beyond simply exhibiting the tickets, the guitars, the objects behind glass walls, frozen in their dusty world, surrounded by close-typed descriptions.

We found a way of connecting that left the museum behind. We shied away from attempting to find critical distance,  instead trying to immerse people in the experience of popular culture; providing those moments of in-drawn breath that come from a remembered icon; creating moments of conversation that arise from a shared memory, a uniting experience. In Videogame Nation and HomeGrown, we provided exhibitions so dense in material that even the most uninterested visitor could experience what it meant to be a fan. And in Black Panther we showed how design, music and politics could mix to change the world – dramatically and forever.

It is fitting that we chose not to fade away. The best popular culture is about something that is fleetingly experience and then stops. No gig should last more than an hour, not sitcom more than two series, no band should be together after ten years. Live it, enjoy it and leave it for the next generation before it grows stale.

Our influence, how we reflected the excitement, the verve and the passion of popular culture, will live on. We were, and are, the only people to make it work in a gallery. We’re proud of what we did. And we’re proud of what will follow.

Vaughan Allen, Chief Executive