Museum dares to reveal what it really costs to make an exhibition

But the exhibition quickly expands to consider costs beyond the monetary. It reveals not just what the show spent, but those human costs that capitalism doesn’t count. Blondell Cummings’s Chicken Soup, 1988, in the 2026 exhibition “Performing Conditions: Artistic Labor and Dependency as Form,” at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Wall vinyl from a previous exhibition removed from the wall but left on the floor by MIT preparators, fulfilling a score by Ghislaine Leung. Thank goodness, then, for alternatives like university museums at research institutions: “Performing Conditions” takes a smart look at an essential subject too often swept under the rug.