Paul Werner
Museum, Inc.:
Inside the Global Art World.
Prickly Paradigm Press, 76 pages, $10.

Books, books, everywhere, and not a word to read. So will go the epitaph of print media.

Prickly Paradigm Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, is one imprint, however, that intends to survive the mega-publisher dirge. Christened in 1993 in Cambridge under the name Prickly Pear, this small press endeavored to revive the culture of the pamphleteer. Matthew Engelke, who became Pear’s co-editor in 1998, now oversees a catalogue of twenty-two titles. All are uniformly designed (soft cover, unattractive), opinionated (contrarian, often critical of the author’s own field), and mercifully to-the-point (many well under 100 pages). Whether all of the “paradigms” are worthwhile is something else. I am still wrestling with two of the titles: Paradigm 13 by James Elkins (What Happened to Art Criticism?) and Paradigm 15 by Lindsay Waters (Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship).

Paradigm 8 by Donna Haraway (The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness) I’m planning to do without—apologies to Fido.

One of the latest “Paradigms,” number 21 for those keeping score, has come by way of an ex-employee of the Guggenheim Museum and its infamous director. The name of Thomas Krens will not be unfamiliar to readers of this magazine. As the museum director of the 1990s, Krens franchised the Guggenheim brand to the highest international bidder and converted Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral jetty into a showroom for motorcycles, Armani clothes—whoever was willing to pay to play. In doing so he sent a shudder down the spine of anyone who regarded a museum as a safe house for culture and not an enterprise to be monetized and leveraged and gambled away.

In Museum, Inc., Paul Werner takes us back to the go-go Nineties when Krens was the dot-com-age entrepreneur who had the museum world up in arms. Werner describes the “verbal gunfights in which Philippe de Montebello, tradition-bound Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and unofficial spokesperson for the League of Disgruntled Directors, met Krens at high noon.”

Werner’s book is rich in metaphor and unfortunately even richer in rant. As a Guggenheim insider, Werner has been presented with a golden journalistic opportunity, but he squanders his chance by mistaking hot air ramblings for old-fashioned story-telling—Krensian fluff, if you will, for the genuine article. Rather than a history of the Guggenheim Museum, we get a crash course in symbolic capital, exchange value, and other Marxist slogans. In place of a Krens backstory, we learn about the “Apologist for the Depraved Playthings of Tyranny and Their Sniveling Lackeys.” Instead of an eye-witness account, we read, “As the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu suggested … As Walter Benjamin put it … As Guy Debord put it … ”

These narrative tics may suffice at Speakers Corner and the graduate student bar, but it gets stale around page ten of Paradigm 21. Mr. Werner clearly has it out for his old boss. At the same time, he strives to prove his poststructural bona fides (you can tell he’s earned a Ph.D. in bad composition from someplace or another). Werner writes that “Montebello, Krens and Kimmelman serviced the same john, it’s just that Krens wasn’t as much of a hypocrite.” Not only is such a statement untrue, it is also unhelpful. No, the museum world won’t be saved by the Age of Werner. It will survive, thanks to bankers like Morgan, tycoons like Frick, and directors like de Montebello. It is good writing and good editing, similarly, that will save the publishing world, and not screeds like Werner’s Museum, Inc.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 24 Number 8, on page 78
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