In The Voices of Silence (1952), André Malraux speculated that
advances in photography and printing were on the brink of
ushering in the age of “the museum without walls,” putting at our
fingertips resources that would “carry infinitely farther that
revelation of the world of art … which the ‘real’ museums
offer within their walls.”

Yes, well. It has turned out, of course, that walls are the one
thing museums cannot get enough of. Everywhere one looks, museums
are engaged in “ambitious” (i.e., huge and expensive) expansions.
This is especially true of that vaguely oxymoronic phenomenon,
the museum of contemporary art. The Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum—what might be more accurately called the Guggenheim
Consortium—was a pioneer in this dubious development. Under the
entrepreneurial directorship of Thomas Krens, the museum did not
simply expand, it went global, consigning its permanent
collection of modernist masterpieces to adjunct status and
adding outlets
—er, that is, branches—not only in SoHo
but also around the world. The most recent one is
Frank Gehry’s titanium-clad structure in Bilbao, Spain, which gobbled up a season’s
worth of adulation and publicity.

If the Guggenheim was in the vanguard, other institutions have
been quick to catch up. Consider the Museum of Modern Art in New
York. Some months ago in this space, we reported on MOMA’s
new plans to embark on the largest expansion in its sixty-year
history. It somehow seemed appropriate that part of the expansion
was to be into space now occupied by an abandoned hotel: “here
today, gone tomorrow” might well be the motto of many museums of
modern art these days. More and more, it seems, museums are bent
on what MOMA’s director Glenn D. Lowry described–apparently
without irony—as “privileging the contemporary.” What this means in
practice, we pointed out, is that the museum will compromise on
its curatorial obligations for the sake of more ephemeral
rewards: publicity, box office triumphs, and what Tina Brown has
taught us to call “buzz.”

Museums in other countries, too, have been quick to follow suit.
London’s Tate Gallery is a case in point. The museum recently
opened large branches in Liverpool and St. Ives; it is
undertaking a gigantic expansion of its “home” galleries in
Millbank, London; and it is in the concluding stages of
converting a huge disused power station directly
across from St. Paul’s in Bankside into the Tate Gallery of
Modern Art at a cost of £134 million (due to open in May 2000).
When Tate officials came
to New York last spring to publicize their new museum of modern
art—the presentation, appropriately, was held at MOMA—they
might as well have been announcing a new theme park for the
Disney company. Attendance figures loomed large in the
presentation: we forget how many millions of visitors per year
were predicted. A slick video was shown that might have been
advertising the latest copy machine or roadster. Our tour of the
construction site in London this summer did nothing to dispel the
impression of the higher hucksterism. We predict that, like so
many industrial spaces that have been converted into art
galleries, the best thing about the Tate Gallery of Modern Art will
be its building.

This is small consolation, however. For at the Tate, as at MOMA
and virtually every other gallery or art museum devoted to
contemporary art, a battle is being waged. It is a battle to
determine the basic principles that will guide museums in the
coming decades. Will connoisseurship and aesthetic discrimination
provide the lead? Or will publicity considerations be allowed to
trump artistic considerations? Will quality prevail? Or will
quantity triumph?

We are not optimistic. For not only have museums of modern and
contemporary art rushed to embrace “the new”—or what they
believe to be new—at any cost, but similar imperatives are
increasingly at work at traditional art
institutions. An especially grim augury was the news that Malcolm
Rogers, the director of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, had
undertaken a program of what we might call “aesthetic cleansing.”
At the end of June, Mr.
Rogers suddenly announced that the museum, in addition to
embarking on a huge building program, was going to be
“restructured.” He eliminated eighteen positions, summarily
dismissed two highly regarded and long-serving curators (one day
they were told to clean out their desks and be gone by 3:00
P.M.), and amalgamated the museum’s departments into what The
New York Times rightly called “mega-departments,” organized not
according to medium but geographically. “The new Art of the
Americas department,” the Times reported, “unites the
departments of American paintings, American decorative arts and
pre-Columbian art, while Art of Europe combines European
paintings and European decorative arts.” The message could not be
clearer: at the Museum of Fine Arts, multicultural goulash would
henceforth be given priority over aesthetics and art historical
scholarship. “An art gallery,” André Malraux also wrote in The Voices
of Silence, “is one of the places which show man at his
noblest.” That was in 1952. We wonder what, were he still with
us, he would say about the art gallery of today.