Six Decades On, Artist MPA Reopens Yoko Ono's Cut Piece at the Broad

A new staging of Yoko Ono's 1964 Cut Piece opened at the Broad in Los Angeles on 15 July 2026, staged by the artist known as MPA and timed to land on the same morning that museum leaders were once again defending themselves in Washington. ARTNEWS's daily Morning Links roundup flagged the performance alongside fresh political pressure on the Smithsonian, the pairing a reminder that the two stories, art and politics, are not running in parallel so much as on the same track.

Cut Piece is, in its simplest form, a proposition: the artist sits on a stage and invites the audience, one at a time, to come up and cut away a piece of clothing with a pair of scissors. Ono first performed it at the Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto, and the piece has since been re-staged in cities from New York to London, each time absorbing the temperature of the room it lands in. Sixty-two years after Kyoto, the work's core tension, the consent and exposure of the person on stage, the complicity of the person cutting, has not aged. MPA's staging at the Broad, a private contemporary art museum on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, asks that question of a 2026 audience.

What the piece asks, and what the room answers

The original Kyoto performance ran until Ono decided to stop it; subsequent performances have varied in length and in how far the audience was willing to go. In some versions, audience members have cut gently and returned to their seats; in others, the cutting has escalated, the scissors moving closer to the body, the social contract between performer and viewer thinning out in real time. The Broad staging arrives with a museum context, a ticketed audience, and a security perimeter that earlier iterations did not have. Those are not incidental details; they are the conditions under which the work is being asked to do its work.

MPA, whose prior live interpretations have leaned into the piece's uncomfortable intimacy, has framed the new staging as an effort to let the audience confront what the original work was always asking. The artist has spoken, in material accompanying the Broad run, about the difference between watching a video of Cut Piece and sitting in the room while it happens. That distinction is the point of the piece, and it is also the point that museum programming tends to soften, since most visitors are content to encounter a work of performance art as a documented object rather than as an event.

The Smithsonian, again

ARTNEWS's morning roundup paired the Broad staging with another iteration of a now-familiar Washington story: more political pressure on the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian Institution, the federally chartered complex that includes the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and nineteen museums in total, has spent much of 2025 and 2026 fending off attempts by members of Congress and outside commentators to dictate what its exhibitions can and cannot say. The institution's leadership has, in statements reported by wire services, framed itself as a nonpartisan custodian of the national collection; its critics have framed it, variously, as too ideological, too deferential to particular political currents, or simply overdue for a curatorial rethink.

The pressure has landed hardest on exhibitions that touch American history, race, and the present-day boundaries of public memory. Curators at the National Museum of American History and at the National Museum of the American Indian have, in public statements, defended their programming as scholarly and sourced. Outside commentators have called for programming changes, board resignations, or, in the most aggressive framing, a structural restructuring of the institution's governance. None of these proposals has yet produced a documented change to a specific exhibition's content, but the cumulative effect of the pressure, the calendar of hearings, letters, and op-eds, has been to push the Smithsonian's leadership into a posture of public defence.

Why the two stories belong together

What connects a 1964 Kyoto performance piece and a 2026 Washington funding fight is not that they share a curator or a donor. It is that both are about the limits of what an institution is willing to host. Cut Piece asks what a viewer will do when given permission, in a room, to act on a person. The Smithsonian fight asks what a legislature is willing to do when given authority, in a hearing room, to act on an institution. In both cases the pressure comes from outside, the consent of the host is what is being tested, and the answer is being written in real time.

The pairing is also a useful corrective to the way performance art tends to be discussed in American coverage, which often treats it as a curiosity of the 1960s avant-garde, sealed behind glass in a museum vitrine, and forgettable in the broader cultural conversation. Cut Piece has been staged continuously because it remains a live question, not a historical artefact. The Smithsonian fight, by the same token, is not an aberration in the cultural record; it is the current shape of an argument the country has been having, with varying intensity, for decades.

The audience MPA is actually addressing

Los Angeles is a useful city to do this work in. The Broad sits a few blocks from the Walt Disney Concert Hall, down the street from MOCA, and within walking distance of smaller venues that have, for years, programmed performance pieces with serious audiences. The city's art infrastructure is large enough to absorb a piece like Cut Piece without it becoming a one-off stunt, and small enough, in the right room, to feel like an event rather than an opening.

The audience MPA is reaching is also the audience that, in 2026, is most likely to have read at least one news story about the Smithsonian in the past month. That overlap is not an accident. The work is asking the same question of two different institutions, and it is asking it in a city that has, in its own way, spent the last decade arguing about what its cultural institutions are for. The answer, when the piece closes, will be visible on the stage floor in the form of the cut fabric; the answer for the Smithsonian will take longer to read, and will arrive in the form of an exhibition catalogue, a board minute, or a line item in a continuing resolution.

What the staging does not resolve

The piece does not resolve the Smithsonian fight, and it is not intended to. It also does not resolve the older argument about who owns the performance pieces of the 1960s, who has the right to re-stage them, and under what conditions a re-staging is faithful to the original rather than a dilution of it. ARTNEWS's roundup does not specify how long MPA's run will continue, whether the Broad has published curatorial notes on the staging, or how the institution is handling the audience-complicity elements of the work in a building that, by default, is configured for the safe display of static objects.

What can be said from the available material is that the piece is happening, on a date, in a museum, in a city that knows how to host it, while the country's largest museum complex is once again being asked, by people who do not work there, to justify what it shows. Both of those facts will be true at the end of the run. Neither will be resolved by the performance itself. That is, in part, what makes the work worth staging again.

Desk note: Monexus paired the Broad staging with the Smithsonian pressure story because the wire roundups separated them. The point is not that one causes the other; it is that the same question, what an institution is willing to host, is being asked of two institutions at once.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut_Piece
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broad
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoko_Ono