Museum of What’s Happening Now shows Brown’s trivializing opinion of popular trends within the art market of his time—in this case, Abstract Expressionism. In one fell swoop the work satirizes artists who blindly follow such trends, collectors who artificially puff up the value of popular art, and institutions that glorify whatever happens to be at the top of the art world pyramid scheme at the moment.

This piece was produced alongside a larger group of works inspired by circus sideshow banners, a fascination of Brown's throughout much of his adult life. The banners were typically the product of untrained artists with limited access to art historical imagery and art making materials, both of which Brown appreciated as he saw their artistic vision as uncompromised and pure. All the sideshow banner paintings that Brown produced were circled in either orange or green borders, framing an image of American culture as if it were the star of an extravagant circus production.

Museum of What’s Happening Now is an unusual deviation from the rest of the series, featuring a blue banner, and fusing the sideshow banner motif with Brown's long term interest in satirizing the contemporary art world. Here, he rather literally proposes that the subject of the contemporary museum is an elaborate, theatrical, shocking splash of color meant to scandalize rather than inspire. While Brown knew and admired many contemporary artists, including abstract artists, throughout much of his adult life, he was skeptical of pure abstraction, concerned that there was an escalating "arms race" of gimmicks and "shock value" which overshadowed content.