The Playful Floor: Contemporary Masters at Moco

I have written about the Moco Museum in Amsterdam more than any other building. The Banksys, the Basquiat room, the immersive floors, the garden.

What I had never written about is the top floor, which is where the jokes are.

Everything up there is funny. Not clever-funny or knowing-funny, but actually funny: a dinosaur in love, a cat on wheels, Michelangelo’s David in a surgical mask. It is the part of Moco that sends people back down the stairs smiling, and nobody talks about it because it is easier to talk about Banksy.

The glitter Mickey hangs on the same wall as the panel that introduces the whole floor, a couple of metres to its left, and the panel promises something else entirely.

Moco’s Top Floor at a Glance
🦖 The character · The “Contemporary Masters” top floor is the funny one — a marble T-rex making a heart, a cat on wheels, Michelangelo’s David in a surgical mask. The part that sends people back down the stairs smiling.
🖼️ Who’s up there · Damien Hirst, Mungo Thomson, Frankey, Invader, Tonarelli, Takashi Murakami, Icy and Sot, KAWS and Estudio Campana.
🪞 Don’t skip · The Mungo Thomson TIME mirror — stand in front of it and you’re Person of the Year. Photographing it is the point.
🚫 No lift · Villa Alsberg is a listed building, so the upper floors are stairs only; wheelchair users are admitted free to the ground floor.
💡 Tip · Go up first, while you have the energy, then come back down to the famous Banksy floors. Read the small artwork labels; skip the marketing on the big wall panels.

What the panel says

The Contemporary Masters text tells visitors that these artists challenge the norm, move us to self-reflect, engage our inner activist and empower us to lead with love. Then it hands the visitor a Mickey Mouse made of five circles of glitter on a blue ground, by Damien Hirst, an artist who once sold a diamond-covered skull.

I am not complaining about the art. I am complaining about the pitch. The room’s real strength is play, and the copy will not say the word.

It is worth being precise here, because the individual artwork labels on this floor are excellent. They give materials, dimensions, the acquisition year and a plain account of what the piece is doing. It was those labels that taught me Basquiat on an earlier visit. The oversell is in the section-level marketing, not the curation.

You are the Person of the Year

A full-height mirror with the TIME masthead and PERSON of the YEAR printed across it, so that whoever stands in front of it is on the cover. Somebody had drawn a stick figure on the glass, which improves it.

The label makes the point rather well: people have worked a lifetime or spent enormous sums to get on that cover, and Mungo Thomson hands it over for nothing. It is the most generous thing in the building and it costs the museum a sheet of glass.

Frankey

A tyrannosaurus, carved in white Carrara marble, grinning, with its two short arms brought together in front of its chest to make a heart. The joke is that a T-rex famously cannot reach anything, and this one has found the one gesture those arms are perfect for.

I stood in front of it longer than I stood in front of anything else on the floor.

The second is Benney Epic. A fat orange cat mounted on its back against the wall with its belly facing out and its front paws spread. The back paws are still there, toes and all, and a small black wheel sits at the end of a thin metal rod running out past each leg. The tail hangs straight down below. Moco’s own panel for Frankey talks about positive disruption and interrupting the familiar, which is a long way of saying he puts a cat on wheels and leaves the rest alone.

The invader

Twenty-eight red ceramic tiles with two black and two white ones for eyes, mounted in a shallow white box frame. The museum’s label counts 4,164 Invaders installed in more than 80 cities across six continents, plus one in outer space.

The pieces are made of the same square tiles used in bathrooms and metro stations, which is the whole point. This is a gallery version of something the artist normally cements to the outside of a building without asking.

Marble jokes

I have seen the real David, at the Accademiain Florence, from close enough to count the veins in his wrist. I had not seen him in a surgical mask.

Tonarelli carved the mask into the marble rather than adding it afterwards, which is the part that stays with me. On the plinths either side are two pairs of shoes, also in stone: a white marble pair of Air Jordans called His Airness by the Dutch artist Frank E Hollywood, and a black marble pair opposite.

Three plinths, three pieces of carved stone, and not one of them is trying to be solemn about it.

Murakami, and the branding

Takashi Murakami does the flower. A grinning flower head in twelve rainbow petals, sitting on the dark blue body of an owl. It is roughly a metre and a half tall and cut out rather than framed, so it stands off the wall like a sign.

Four small square canvases, two on white grounds and two on black, each covered edge to edge in the repeated LV monogram in about thirty colours.

This is where the young crowd stopped. Not at the dinosaur, not at the mirror. At four squares of luxury logo, photographing them carefully. Whatever the panel downstairs says about challenging norms, this is branding working exactly as designed, and it was the most popular thing on the floor.

The one that is not a joke

A young woman in profile, her hair and shoulders made entirely of small black birds on branches, with more birds breaking away across the pale blue background. Up close the hair resolves into hundreds of separate silhouettes.

It is called Let Her Be Free, by Icy and Sot, and it is the only work on this floor that does what the Contemporary Masters panel claims all of them do. It is also the one people walked past.

KAWS

The figure is called Companion. About a metre tall, matt black, standing with its arms at its sides and two yellow crosses where the eyes should be. The plinth says please do not touch, in white, at ankle height.

Two armchairs, both made of soft toys, and both made by KAWS with the Brazilian design studio Estudio Campana. The first is Man’s Best Friend Sofa, from 2018: a whole seat of white Snoopys on a frame of stainless steel and Cumaru wood, the crossed-out eyes repeated across every surface.

The second is Monster Chair, from 2019, in plush toys, stainless steel and bronze. Dozens of red Elmos, orange noses pointing in every direction, made in an edition of twenty-five.

Then Lonely Thoughts. A small red character crouched at the bottom of the frame, with four orange bars across a white panel above it and a much larger blue figure filling the background. After a floor of jokes, this one is not funny at all, and it is hung last.

Bubbly Tips

• Do the top floor properly. Most people arrive for Banksy on the lower floors and are tired by the time they get up here. Go up first if the stairs allow it and come back down to the famous things.
• Read the artwork labels, skip the section panels. The small labels beside each piece are specific and useful. The large wall texts are marketing.
• Stand in front of the TIME mirror. That is the artwork. Not photographing it misses the entire point of the piece.
• Look for the pantograph marks on David-19. The small drilled reference points and chisel marks are deliberate and easy to miss under the mask.
• There is no lift. Villa Alsberg is a listed building and Moco has not been permitted to install one, so the upper floors are stairs only. Wheelchair users are admitted to the ground floor free of charge.
• Allow an hour, not an afternoon. The building is small and the standard visit runs about sixty to ninety minutes. Booking a late afternoon slot thins the crowd considerably.
• Book a timed ticket. Entry is by slot and late arrivals are not guaranteed a place.
• Bring nothing large. There are no lockers at the Amsterdam site, so a big bag becomes your problem for the whole visit.
• Combine it with Museumplein, not with the Rijksmuseum. Moco is a short visit surrounded by long ones. Pairing it with a walk across the square works better than stacking it against a four-hour museum.

Final Thoughts

The wall panel says these artists are changing the game. On the evidence of one floor, what they are mostly doing is making people laugh in a building where laughing is not expected, which is a smaller claim and a truer one.

A dinosaur that finally found something its arms are good for. A cat that has been given wheels. A mirror that puts a stranger on the cover of a magazine for free. And in the corner, a woman made of birds that almost nobody stopped for.

Until next time!

xoxo,
Bubbly 🎈