The first and only time I cried in an art exhibition was on my twenty-third birthday. It was June and it was balmy and it was at Fotografiska Stockholm, a repurposed industrial building turned art museum sitting on the wharf over the sea. I was touring the Baltic as part of a research fellowship, and my dear Charles was with me. Before we entered the museum, a kind stranger took a fabulous photo of us with our big stupid birthday grins and thrift-store vintage outfits, and after we entered a kind staff member pointed us towards the exhibitions. We found Diana Markosian’s Santa Barbara, a dioramic show recreating her childhood as the daughter of a mail-order bride, leaving post-Soviet Russia in 1996 aged seven to move into the California home of a man neither she nor her mother had ever met. Markosian displays her own real childhood photos alongside an autobiographical film recreation of her childhood through her mother’s perspective. The film and the pictures are accompanied by hand-edited scripts and headshots of the actors she auditioned to play her family. Maroksian’s photographs are precise, cutting, surreal, and evocative of an emotion somewhere between nostalgia and melancholy — the artifice and confession of Santa Barbara simultaneously on display. The next exhibition’s only memorable trait was its mediocrity, in the shadow of the art that came before it: marble sculptures of distorted and contorted bodies failing to do in stone what Egon Schiele could do in a twenty-minute, two-dimensional study.

After the exhibition and the necessary decompressive silence that followed, Charles and I headed to the top floor for a set-course menu of local, seasonal dishes at Fotografiska’s Michelin Green Star restaurant. It was a lavish and thoughtful meal in a powerful and thought-provoking space — an altogether perfect birthday. Fotografiska is surely an impressive museum. Yet Fotografiska is, simultaneously, a harbinger for the dismantlement and financialization of creativity as we know it.