The Nova Music Festival Exhibition Was a Nightmare Version of the Instagram Museum

In late 2015, I had maybe one of my most memorable hilariously bad art experiences, if you want to call it that. Museum was in the name so I will just go with it. Sent on assignment by a brand that paid me a dollar per word (a rarity in our underpaid profession) to do some thankfully uncredited content writing for their blog, I visited the pop-up Museum of Feelings, the “first museum that reacts to emotions—and turns them into art.” Held outside Brookfield Place in Battery Park City, I waited in the chilly fall weather, watching the museum’s tent blow in the river breezes while changing colors, apparently according to the moods of the city. This fixation with color continued inside through a series of—unsurprisingly, given their prominence at the time—“immersive” and “experiential”  installations, largely distinguishable by their different lighting schemes, perfect for that likable Instagram shot. In one room, a kaleidoscope of projected cherry blossoms spun around viewers, while in another, an electric blue circle jittered and jiggled, following visitors around the darker bluish-violet space. And what would a lame pop-up be without a Kusama rip-off? At the Museum of Feelings, this came in the form of an emerald green “forest” dripping with fairy lights. Can’t imagine Zwirner was happy with that!

These installations would have been terrible on their own—devoid of meaning, half-assed in their construction, and completely nonsensical given the museum’s supposed connection to feelings. Yet, what made the Museum of Feelings so irredeemably wretched—and notably absurd—was the big reveal: it was all an elaborate ad for Glade PlugIns! Each room corresponded to a nose-tickling scent. The Kusama plagiarism? Glade^® Balsam & Fir. The shaky circle room? Glade® Blue Odyssey™ The flowers? Took a lot of imagination but Blooming Peony & Cherry™. At the time, I was tickled by how the popularity of immersive installations was used to sell drug store products that mostly exist to cover up the stench of litterboxes, unwashed dogs, and sofa farts. Even I couldn’t predict that almost a decade later these same tacky, vacuous, social-media-driven, aesthetic strategies would be wielded to exhibit the remains of bombed cars and shot-up Porta Johns in order to honor and memorialize the massacre of 364 people at a music festival in Israel on October 7, 2023. But that’s exactly what the Nova Music Festival Exhibition, or, the mouthful of its full title, October 7^th 06:29 AM – The Moment Music Stood Still, did. Yes, there were even bespoke scents, mainly the rank festival go-to: incense and patchouli oil.

Look. I know some readers, in a perpetual state of rightful rage about the all-out brutality of Israel’s war in Gaza and the Biden administration’s refusal to put any sort of brakes on it, will be unhappy that I even attended, buying a ticket that included a donation for a smattering of vague and ambitious goals to “commemorate the victims, rehabilitate the survivors of the festival, support the Tribe of Nova community, promote education, and call for the return of hostages.” Others won’t like that I’m analyzing the exhibition beyond every other article I’ve found that just details its “heartbreaking” aspects without fully and accurately representing just how goddamn bizarre it all was (a reason why I’m finally writing this up). But hear me out: I made the trek to the exhibition in its final week for the same reason I do, well, anything: curiosity! I had to bear witness for myself! Plus, as evidenced by my previous writing on the greatest American museum, the 9/11 Memorial Museum, I have an enduring fascination with grim, overwrought, just-on-the-edge-of-exploitative trauma exhibitions, preferably those that end their solemn remembrances with a gift shop. Hey–those terrorist attacks already happened. Why not make money? Wanton capitalism rules!

It was the gift shop that convinced me to visit the exhibition thanks to a photo posted to X of an “exit through the gift shop” set-up that included T-shirts, baseball caps, necklaces, scarves, and, my favorite, a dusty tan bucket hat embroidered with the word “breathe,” a bold choice more appropriate for a yoga retreat than a memorial for the victims of a terrorist attack in which hundreds of people stopped breathing. With that level of questionable branding, I was sold. Like many, I only heard about the exhibition, which had been open since April, after it became the target of a pro-Palestine demonstration with protestors setting off colorful smoke bombs and scaring tourists taking selfies in front of the Stock Exchange. As with most of these protests, from the students at Columbia to one of the most recent at a Los Angeles synagogue having a fire sale of land in the occupied West Bank, various local elected officials rushed to respond, calling it “unconscionable and un-American,” “repulsive and vile,” and akin to “desecrating the graves.” Beyond giving politicians an excuse to wag their fingers yet again, the protestors, by choosing an admittedly unsympathetic spot, gave the exhibition the best marketing boost it could ever hope for, as well as an excuse to defiantly extend the show.

Given this free PR, I was unsurprised to find a long line outside 35 Wall Street, which gave me an opportunity to voyeuristically watch the peckish couple ahead of me argue over what candy to buy at the newsstand. “Kit Kat or Snickers? KIT KAT OR SNICKERS?!!” the husband hollered, stomping off to satisfy his hanger just as an employee was about to scan their tickets. Once I reached the front of the line, the reason for the hold-up became clear: a TSA-style security check with guards wielding baskets of no-no items like, oddly, hand sanitizer and lip gloss. Though food and drink were prohibited, the security wasn’t as rigorous as it seemed considering later in the show I watched a distressing video of a survivor detailing their experiences while a man next to me crunched on a bag of pretzels. Immediately through the metal detectors, our selected group crammed together in the entryway, waiting to enter the first room, which contained a five-minute video. This meant we had five minutes of our own to absorb the wall text, which was frankly not anywhere near enough time to mentally process the melodrama heaped on what is already a tragedy. The writing was so mind-bogglingly over-the-top that it’s worth quoting at length:

“Thousands of radiant souls came together for a celebration of unconditional love and the spreading of light.

In one moment, the festive atmosphere is shattered. The Angel of Death swoops, firing a barrage of hateful missiles that cut through the joy like an icy winter wind. The air, thick with laughter and friendship, becomes a terrifying scene of inconceivable horror. Innocence and love, which had soared so high, crash into the ground in an avalanche of shattered dreams.

The festival, which had been a symbol of joy and unity, became a chilling spectacle of terror, instantly sealing its dark place in history.

Hundreds of souls who will never return home. Dozens who find themselves in the merciless grip of a cruel enemy. Thousands more who bear the scars of that morning, their bodies and souls marked for evermore.”

An icy winter wind! An avalanche of shattered dreams! The Angel of Death! Evermore! Really paints a picture, huh? I mean, what the fuck? Is this necessary? The attack was bad enough without having to suffer through this kind of writing. If I were more generous, I’d blame some ChatGPT nonsense, but I highly doubt that’s the case. A real human wrote this.

After the video finished for the previous bunch, my group slowly shuffled into the video room. With signs labeled the “Mushroom Stage,” the room intended to immerse us within a part of the festival, filled with fake trees, overlaid with a giant patterned tent, and illuminated with a purple-pink glow. This was my first introduction to the aggressive lighting design of the show, which is almost entirely dark, a strange clash between the reality of the daytime attacks and the exhibition’s atmospheric excesses. An enormous screen hung from stage-like rafters beside which stood a sign advertising the set times for different DJs. The video itself featured mostly young festival attendees joyously dancing in slow motion to soupy string music. Because I stood toward the back, I could barely make out the subtitle translations, but from what I gathered, the video set up the Nova Music Festival as a testament to the universality, belonging, and collective transcendent power of music and dance. A music festival celebrating peace and love is all well and good, but it was also hard not to think about the Palestinians living not so far away not invited to the party. The video finishes with the early morning set by DJ Yarin Ilovich as he’s told to shut it down for a “code red.” The screen goes black and we now had to enter hell.

The footage of festival-goers celebrating, blissfully unaware of what was to come, was certainly both chilling and devastating. But this primer in service of plunging visitors into an experiential world reminded me of the beginning of the Haunted Mansion ride at Disney World,  And a haunted house thrill ride isn’t exactly an inaccurate comparison given the next part of the show. Down a thin, brick-lined, ruby red-lit hallway with more fake trees was the core of the Nova exhibition, dedicated to what looks like a tent city abandoned after a stiff wind. Through the winding space, tents hung with Christmas lights sat empty, their sleeping bags unfurled. Dusty lawn chairs lay tipped over on even scuzzier rugs. Strewn among these small campsites was a bunch of trash—empty Coke and water bottles, a guitar, a tiny disco ball, fairy wings, feather boas, prop rings, laptops, a ripped football, backpacks, a yoga book, a chess board, tote bags, blankets, heaps of clothing. Relatable, music festival fare…that is, until I peeped an automatic rifle. Huh. According to the label, all of this detritus, including the gun, came from the actual Nova Music Festival site. Jesus. If the objects of the dead, taken, injured, or at the very least, stricken with PTSD weren’t unsettling on their own, the purposefully claustrophobic layout required visitors to duck under tree branches, tromp all over people’s stuff, and maneuver around each other.

The trodding, squeezing, and tripping were all in an attempt to gawk at recorded first-person footage of the attacks presented on a range of monitors, iPads, and cellphones placed on the walls, the ground, and even wedged in tents. Some of these videos were taken by Hamas members themselves, gleefully psyching themselves up as they headed to the festival grounds, while others were captured by festivalgoers hiding in teeny-tiny spaces trying to survive. Much of this footage will be familiar: Shani Louk’s limp body being loaded into the back of a truck, Naama Levy getting led into a car with bloody pants, Noa Argamani reaching out on the back of a bike as she’s taken hostage, and an audiotape of a man reportedly from Hamas calling his family to brag about killing Jews. With a cacophony of yelling, screaming, and gunshots, this overstimulating, crowded space aimed to evoke a trauma response in the viewer.

And whew, it was an overwhelming success. But (and yes, I have a but), showcasing this footage within a dim installation filled with people’s crap, not to mention encouraging viewers to paw at things, made the exhibition feel like a mix of Sleep No More, those wacky Southern Christian Hell Houses, mounted to reveal the dangers of drugs, drunk driving, sex, and abortions, and a campfire that replaced singalongs with ghoulishly pouring over gore videos. It’s pure, unadulterated, horror theater. None of which felt particularly somber, closer to rubbernecking at a car crash or stomping through a recreation of Jonestown. Do we really need to stand on victims’ yoga mats to feel the horrors of people at a music festival being butchered? Is straddling an upturned lawn chair while gawking at blurred-out bodies truly the best way to remember the dead? And why is it so goddamn dark in here?! I understood October 7^th was bad without doing this.

There were moments of deep meaning within this chaos though. A woman’s rainbow scarf draped across yet another lawn chair. Beside it, a person placed a card that read, “This was the scarf that one of my friends was wearing in her missing photo. Shir was BRAVE, kind, joyful, and radiated love. I miss her and I love her.” I mean, shit. However, this was a small detail that a lot of viewers likely missed. Most of my cohorts were understandably distracted and caught up in the flashy slaughter imagery rather than sifting through camp cast-offs like it was a yard sale. The emotional parts of the installation were also continually undermined by other baffling and ridiculous install choices like a red lawn chair draped with a man’s grey Calvin Klein undies. This found sculpture sat at the entrance of a small room about rapes and sexual assaults. What the hell am I supposed to get from that installation? Who lost their skivvies?!

The campsite of carnage at least restricted itself to the human touch of people’s personal items. That was clearly much too subtle for the organizers. We need to go bigger! Bigger! BIGGER! That’s the only thing that can account for the installations in the following room, which opened up to a sprawling hangar-like space. This mercifully airier space provided separate areas for larger festival remnants and a contemplative Kabbalah-referencing Altar or Einsof (Infinite light) installation, mostly large sheer curtains and projections in front of the Funktion One sound system belonging to Matan Lior who was killed in the attacks. While the market stalls of festival gewgaws—dreamcatchers, itsy figurines, flowered button-down shirts, Hindu wall coverings—were the most restrained, the same cannot be said for the adjacent blown-up and shot-up skeletal husks of cars that looked like the remnants of a Monster Truck rally. And if cars tossed around by King Kong weren’t enough, the exhibition added some pizzazz with strobe light effects blinkering on a timer inside the crispy interior. The cars joined other shock and awe displays like the shattered remnants of the bar with cigs, empty bottles of Campari (the horror!), and Coke coolers where people hid for hours and a wall of porta potties pimpled with red circles, drawing the eye to numerous bullet holes.  One of the toilets was tipped over, encouraging people to morbidly peek inside and confirm, yes, it still reeked like a porta john.

These installations clearly took inspiration from the 9/11 Memorial Museum—a fact confirmed by a quote from exhibition cofounder Yoni Feingold in The Art Newspaper. However, there were stark differences. The 9/11 Memorial Museum treats monumental Richard Serra-like warped beams from the World Trade Center’s façade, bent at a near-90-degree angle due to impact, John Chamberlain-esque fire trucks, and gigantic hunks of airplane with a religious reverence, somewhere between priceless sculptures and holy relics. The Nova Music Festival Exhibition, though, went a bit too far, attempting to recreate some of the horrors through flashing haunted house tactics, mood lighting, and participatory aspects. I’m surprised they didn’t suggest viewers could climb in the Coke coolers and feel what it was like to fear for their lives! With the organizers focusing on the “experiential,” the exhibition came off as a macabre nightmare version of an Instagram Museum, closer to the Museum of Feelings’s Glade-scented rooms or the Museum of Ice Cream’s sprinkle pool than the 9/11 Memorial Museum’s blessed elevator motor. It’s worth noting, though, that I was one of the only ones taking photos like a morbid creep.

This isn’t to say other historical museums didn’t have a visible influence. For the winding, stifling campsite, the organizers had to think of the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s early historical sections on slavery, intentionally tightly organized to give the feeling of the Middle Passage. The primary influence, though, couldn’t be more overt. A pile of abandoned shoes—Converse, hiking boots, sneakers—piled on a Lost and Found table made a direct link to Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum’s mountain of shoes stripped from Holocaust victims. Sitting on a table like a flea market, these shoes joined other items left in a panicked hurry: purses, hats, birth control pills, stuffed animals, and much, much more. If you’re wondering how the hell an exhibition in New York acquired all this stuff that feels like it should be used as evidence, yeah, me too. It became even more shocking when I learned this exhibition, organized originally by some of the people involved in the Nova Music Festival, was first displayed in Tel Aviv in December 2023, just two months after the attacks. It’s as if they swept up and thought: we can use this.

That original exhibition did not contain what I consider to be by far the most moving part of the show: the documentary-style interviews with survivors who shared their experiences and the stories of their loved ones. Sprinkled throughout the space, near support beams, next to the cars, beside the loos, these videos were added later, seemingly thanks to music manager and Taylor Swift nemesis Scooter Braun, one of the show’s New York partners who was integral to the exhibition traveling to NYC (and soon, Los Angeles). And it’s a good thing as these are probably the only reason I’m not writing the whole damn thing off as a deeply perverse exercise in exploitation. The testimonials were as riveting as they were harrowing, revealing a kind of (extra)ordinary heroism that emerges during these types of events as the festival-goers and security fended for themselves. The helpers, as Mr. Rogers would say. People hugging each other close while hiding,  taking a selfie while cowering under a truck to look back on if they survived (and they did), and driving others to safety even if they had to die in the process. These interviews acted as the show’s emotional core, alongside the candle-lit photo memorial for the deceased, much beyond the snuff films or fire-bombed cars. It really could have just been a documentary.

But it’s more interesting to me that it’s not. Something is fascinating about the evolution of elaborately staged, club-lit, Instagram museum aesthetics being utilized for propaganda. Now, by propaganda, I don’t mean that October 7^th did not happen, that these stories are not real or tragic, or that it should not be taken seriously, grieved, and remembered. For the record, before anyone accuses me of antisemitism, I see the 9/11 Memorial Museum as heartstrings-tugging U.S. propaganda too. What is notable about this atrocity exhibition, however, is that despite–or maybe because of its morbidity–it is possibly the most effectively convincing that I’ve ever experienced. In fact, I’m not sure how anyone could leave that exhibition without furiously feeling like, fuck it, nuke Gaza today. That thought crossed my mind and I don’t even agree with that!!

In every interview I’ve read with the exhibition’s organizers, they’re quick to assert that the exhibition is not meant to be political. While it may not be their intention, of course, it’s political! The assault on Gaza lingered in the back of my mind at every point of the show. And it made me sad, mostly for how fucking dumb we are as a species and how our leaders can utilize mass death for their own selfish, bloodthirsty war games, land grabs, and ethnic cleansing. I felt sad for the victims of October 7^th and I felt sad for the Palestinian civilians who have been killed, maimed, or starved in retaliation. And I felt sad for the hostages and survivors of October 7^th that the trauma they have to live with is now being used as a pawn and an excuse by a nutjob desperately trying to keep himself in power through war. And how the legacy of that war will only be the fury and radicalization of future generations that will just lead to more attacks like October 7th. And so it goes…

In the end, though, what the fuck am I going to do about that particular conundrum? It’s not as if Bibi is listening to his government or people, let alone Biden in the hours he’s lucid and stops the ass-kissing for a second to suggest that maybe bombing refugee tents in Rafah (or hospitals or humanitarian aid workers or their own hostages) is not ideal. So I did what any American would do. No, not sit by the exhibition’s concluding stone-lined reflecting pool installation and contemplate. I thousand-yard stared blankly while perusing the gift shop, clearly included with an understanding of the kind of retail therapy Americans need after viewing bloodshed. The merch was all emblazoned with the same bland, inoffensive slogan, “We Will Dance Again,” as glowing from the nearby neon (of course there’s a neon). I could go on (and on) about how this unimaginative design was a missed opportunity–what about a mini Porta John? A toy demolished car? Have you considered a cheese plate? But I would be remiss if I didn’t make note of my final upset: the “breathe” bucket hat was nowhere to be found.