What You Could Take Away From 'David Bowie Is'

There is a wonderful irony in a career retrospective of a living artist that becomes so popular it outlives its subject. In 2010 — long before David Bowie Is travelled to ten other locations around the world, before it landed in Brooklyn earlier this month — London's Victoria & Albert Museum was approached by the rock icon's management to create an exhibit out of the singer's archives. At the time, the idea that such a show would be taken seriously, much less prove to be a success, were hardly foregone conclusions. Music exhibitions of its type were practically non-existent outside of specialty institutions such as the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The barrier between high and low cultures was, even such a short time in the past, still sturdy.

Nevertheless, says Victoria Broackes, senior curator of the V&A's theater and performance department, Bowie was "quite literally top of the museum's list" of potential single-artist exhibition subjects, and when offered the show, she did not hesitate to say yes —