An Old, Familiar Story

In what was once an Urban Outfitters on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue, there is now not quite a museum. You might say it is simply a “space,” one that in the last two years has been rented out for blockbuster traveling pop-ups and immersive museums. Currently, it is hosting Titanic: The Exhibition, a yearlong show dedicated to the most famous shipwreck in history. Standard admission is $38, and when I visited on a recent afternoon, a healthy-sized crowd was filtering in and out. This is not, in fact, the first immersive exhibition I’ve attended at this venue—for professional reasons, in October 2021, I found myself at a show devoted to Banksy titled Genius or Vandal—so I remembered the oddness of the cavernous two-story space, which still does not manage to conceal its bones as a former retail space. (One can imagine the checkout counters studded with lip balms and circa-2009 hipster-humor books; descending the stairs, one can…