GENEVA—The Musée d’Art Contemporain is facing mounting public anger over its new headlining exhibition, *Presence*, which has drawn formal complaints from visitors for consisting entirely of a 40-meter drywall corridor with a slightly drafty atmosphere.
The exhibition, which opened Tuesday with a €28 entry fee, is marketed as the crown jewel of the museum’s summer season. However, patrons expecting the promised "sensory investigation into spatial vacancy" have instead accused the institution of hostile apathy. According to museum blueprints, the installation features no paintings, sculptures, or digital projections, offering instead a standard industrial carpet, a drop-ceiling, and a single fluorescent bulb operating at a slightly misaligned frequency of 50 hertz.
"I walked in expecting a journey through the human condition, but I just felt like I was waiting for a driver's license renewal," said local resident Marc-André Dubois, who stood in line for two hours on opening day. "There is a single fire extinguisher on the wall, but when I asked the docent if it was a metaphor for global warming, he told me it was just the building code."
Dubois added that the exhibition ended abruptly at an emergency exit door that led directly to a gravel parking lot and a recycling depot.
Despite the backlash, museum administrators have defended the installation, which was curated by Berlin-based minimalist Dieter Voss. In a press conference on Thursday, the museum's chief curator, Dr. Hélène Vance, rejected calls for ticket refunds, arguing that the public’s frustration was proof of the exhibition's artistic success.
"Modern society is addicted to stimulation, to the point where simple, unadorned transit space causes psychological distress," Vance said. "By presenting the public with a hallway that is precisely 1.2 degrees Celsius cooler than comfortable room temperature, Voss forces the viewer to confront the raw, terrifying reality of existing in a corridor."
The controversy has escalated to the Geneva Cantonal Council, which funded 40 percent of the exhibition through a regional cultural development grant. Council member Beatrice Keller has called for a formal audit of the project, specifically questioning whether the museum spent the entirety of its €140,000 budget on standard contractor-grade materials.
"We support the arts, but we must ask if public funds should be used to simulate the exact aesthetic of our own municipal tax offices," Keller said. "Our constituents do not need to pay twenty-eight euros to experience bureaucratic beige."
As of Friday, attendance remained high, driven in part by art students attempting to document the corridor on social media, though many reported that their smartphones automatically flagged the photos as "accidental pocket captures."
The exhibition's gift shop is currently selling small jars of dust collected during the drywall installation for €45, alongside a commuter-style lanyard featuring the exhibition’s title printed in a grey, semi-legible sans-serif font.