Titanic: The Exhibition is on view at 526 Sixth Avenue, New York, NY 10011 through November 2023.
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…