RM's SFMOMA Hit Sold 66,000 Tickets — and Wins Over a Skeptical Critic

More than 66,000 tickets have sold since "RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me" opened in San Francisco last month — advance sales ran six times higher than for any previous San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibition, and merchandise vanished within hours. Yet the art press had barely looked at it. One ARTnews critic did, and came away persuaded that a K-pop star's taste can do serious curatorial work.

What changes when a celebrity curates?

The reviewer admits the reluctance is rational: celebrity sells, and famous names increasingly anchor exhibitions through collections, merchandise and fame. When fame becomes the main draw, the art can recede. RM, born Kim Namjoon, is harder to dismiss. After a 2018 visit to the Art Institute of Chicago exposed how little he knew about Korean artists, he began looking, learning and collecting. His museum vlogs have sent fans on "RM Tours" around the world.

With SFMOMA curators América Castillo and Hyoeun Kim, RM arranged nearly 180 works from his collection and the museum's holdings across eight rooms organized around color, home, friends and people.

How the show works on the eye

The first gallery, "Bluewater," opens with Kim Whanki's 1970 field of tiny blue dots, donated to SFMOMA by the artist's widow. Around it: Yves Klein's pigment, Kim Tschang-yeul's water drops, Tony Feher's plastic bottles, Roni Horn's thick glass. The blue reads as weightless, liquid, dense or impossibly still.

"Friendscape" trades serenity for charm — Ugo Rondinone's bronze fish overhead, old Korean wooden geese on a water-patterned floor, Lee Daiwon's speckled Bugaksan Mountain (1976), RM's first acquisition. In "PhotoBuddha," visitors take selfies beside Nam June Paik's television-watching Buddha. One gallery is titled, simply, "I Don't Know But I Like It." That title is either the show's weakness or its manifesto; the reviewer suspects both. Fandom begins with falling for something first and studying it later — which, the critic notes, is how most critics started too.

The show sharpens when RM turns on himself. In the living-room-like "Home" gallery, hung with Chang Ucchin, Park Soo Keun, Giorgio Morandi and a suspended light by Minjae Kim, Son Sangki's Artificial City–Irony (1987) — a painting of a lavish interior by an artist who endured hardship and painted Seoul neighborhoods facing redevelopment — hangs in an interior much like the one it depicts. "Am I being a boring rich person?" RM asks on the audio guide. "It makes me really uncomfortable, and I like it."

The biographies beneath the brushwork

In "Passion," the backstory deepens. Park Rehyun raised four children, helped her deaf husband, the painter Kim Kichang, communicate, and painted after everyone slept. Rhee Seundja left three sons in wartime Korea for Paris, imagining each brushstroke as a spoonful of rice for her children. Curators told the reviewer some visitors had cried, and more than 700 post-visit comments were submitted to the museum's digital mural.

The show ends in umber: Yun Hyong-keun's dark vertical bands beside a Rothko, dismantling the "Korean Rothko" shorthand — Rothko's color dissolves at the edges; Yun's sinks into the cloth, dense and earthbound.

The timing matters. The show opened days after Ha Chong-Hyun's Asian Art Museum retrospective and the Samsung-backed "Korea" show at the British Museum, and a week before Haegue Yang's Dia Beacon commission. Decades of scholarship built Korean art's moment; RM supplies what none of it could guarantee — an audience ready to follow him.

The caveat stands: a collector's taste is no substitute for art history, and star-driven exhibitions should not become a museum habit. But RM, as the critic puts it, isn't standing in front of the paintings. He's pointing at them.