Barry McGee and the Art of Taking Over
Priya N. Chen on 29th Oct 2026
The Daily Marquee
Barry McGee and the Art of Taking Over
I like an art-world takeover best when it makes us wonder who owns the room. Barry McGee’s latest move puts that question between a gallery and a 99 Cents Only Store—and makes the distance between them look less obvious than we might wish.
The Los Angeles Times reported Thursday, Oct. 29, that the street artist is taking over a gallery after his 99 Cents Only Store takeover. That is the extent of the confirmed story here; the headline gives us the sharp contrast, not the gallery’s details. Still, the contrast has plenty to chew on. A gallery asks us to look carefully. A discount store asks us to keep moving. Both arrange things, direct attention, and turn looking into a kind of public behavior.
Art has been borrowing from commerce for a long time. Pop art brought the supermarket and the billboard into the picture, where familiar packaging could suddenly seem strange. McGee’s headline suggests a step beyond borrowing: not just putting the everyday world on a gallery wall, but making the gallery itself part of the question. Is a room important because of what it contains, or because we have been taught to enter quietly and call it art? A bargain store has no such solemn manners. Its invitation is blunt: come in, browse, decide what matters to you.
There is a catch. “Taking over” is a thrilling phrase, but it can become a style of its own, neatly packaged for the art world it appears to disrupt. The gallery is remarkably good at welcoming challenges, giving them a room, and making them respectable. That doesn’t make the gesture empty. It makes the tension worth watching: the unruly promise of a takeover meeting the institution’s talent for turning almost anything into an exhibition.
And this is where the story reaches beyond art. We live among spaces designed to seize our attention, from shops to feeds, each one insisting that the next thing is the thing to see. A gallery can pretend to stand outside that traffic, but it is still a place where attention gets organized. McGee’s move, as the headline frames it, makes that arrangement visible. The fun is not simply that a street artist has crossed into a gallery. It is that the gallery may have to share the stage with the very habits of looking it usually keeps outside.
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