It’s cheap. It’s fast. It offers great shopping, tempting food and
a place to hang out. And visitors can even enjoy the art.


—“Glory Days for the Art Museum,”
The New York Times,
October 5, 1997

Since 1970, the number of art museums in the United States is said to
have increased by more than 50 percent. There’s hardly a
self-respecting town or hamlet that feels complete these days
without some sort of museum or “arts center.” At the same time,
established institutions have embarked on an extraordinary building
frenzy. Is there any major museum that has not lately added, or at least
has plans to add, a wing, pavilion, suite of new galleries,
performance space, or sculpture court into which is decanted the
mandatory restaurant, gift shop, retail outlet, gourmet coffee
emporium, and interactive video learning center with a high-speed
connection to the Internet? Under Thomas Krens, the Guggenheim
Museum has gone even further. The word “Director” had hardly dried
on Mr. Krens’s door before he put his policy of museological
Manifest Destiny into action. There’s the boxy new building towering
over the museum’s original Frank Lloyd Wright structure on upper
Fifth Avenue, of course, as well as the renovated loft spaces downtown at
Prince Street and Broadway known as the Guggenheim Museum SoHo. Then
there are the various colonial outposts of the Guggenheim,
including, most recently, the
one-hundred-million-dollar
titanium-clad folly by Frank Gehry in Bilbao, Spain.

I had occasion to think of Mr. Krens and his empire—or
“galaxy,” to use the term he seems to favor—when I attended a two-day
symposium on “Reimagining Museums for New Art” at the Sterling and
Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, one
weekend at the end of September. As was wholly appropriate, the slick
spirit of Thomas Krens was very much palpable in that picturesque,
well-heeled corner of the Berkshires throughout the festivities.
After all, Mr. Krens had come to the Guggenheim from the
Williams College Museum of Art, just a short walk from the Clark
Art Institute.

It was while he was at Williams that Mr. Krens
developed his distinctive, and widely imitated, approach to
directing museums, an approach that combines entrepreneurial savvy
with inveterate trendiness. It was then, too, that Mr. Krens
hatched—or brooded over, anyway—the idea of converting a huge
abandoned factory complex in the neighboring blue-collar town of
North Adams into the world’s biggest museum of contemporary art.
When he got to the Guggenheim, the idea of collaborating with the
planned
Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, as the project was called,
occupied a prominent place on his busy agenda. The state of
Massachusetts committed thirty-five million dollars to the project.
For his part, Mr. Krens sold off a Kandinsky, a Chagall, and a
Modigliani from the Guggenheim’s “permanent” collection in order to
buy works—or, in some cases, plans for works—by Donald Judd and
other Minimalists with which to decorate the facility.

By the early 1990s, Mass MOCA seemed as illusory as the so-called
“Massachusetts Miracle” over which Michael Dukakis had presided as
governor of the state. But it turns out that Mass MOCA wasn’t
dead: it was merely lying in wait. As Joseph Thompson, the new
director, explained in his opening address at the
Clark, enough money has so far been raised to renovate two hundred
thousand square feet—about a third—of the old factory complex.
Following collaborative designs by Frank Gehry, Robert Venturi, and
the venerable firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, this portion
of Mass MOCA is scheduled to open in
a little more than a year
with a vast array
of galleries, restaurants, performance spaces, and
numerous tony commercial clients.

Mr. Thompson, a museum director very much in the mold of Thomas
Krens, was
irrepressibly cheerful and enthusiastic. Mass MOCA, he
promised, would revitalize the economically ravaged town of North
Adams not merely with its myriad new businesses but also by luring the
many tourists who visit Tanglewood and other cultural attractions in
the Berkshires to North Adams to experience the wonders of
postmodern art in Mass MOCA’s acres of galleries.

I believe that a large dollop of skepticism is in order. In the
first place, it is extremely doubtful that many of the tourists who
journey to the Berkshires for the beauty of its scenery and the
pop-classical music programming of Tanglewood are going to be much
interested in the Minimalist art of Donald Judd or cutting-edge
video pieces by David Byrne.

But even more dubious than such pragmatic considerations is the idea of
the museum presupposed by Mr. Thompson’s sales pitch. Like many
museum directors these days, Mr. Thompson wants two very different
sorts of things. He speaks at one moment like a chamber of commerce
cheerleader, dispensing visions of benign gentrification and urban
amenity. But what is meant to bring about this yuppie paradise is
the kind of “transgressive,” often politically charged art that disdains
the bourgeois values that the museum is presumed to be nurturing. The
result is an exercise in cynical hucksterism. “Art” is the talisman
before which the public is meant to bow down and open its
pocketbook. But the vast majority of the art in question is as
repugnant to the public as the public—though not, of course, the
public’s money—is to the “artists” responsible for such art.

As the subsequent presentations at the Clark symposium made clear
(if any further clarity on the subject were required), one thing
conspicuously missing from the new museology is any concern with
aesthetic value. Art was a commercial resource to be marketed and
exploited as aggressively as possible; it was also a megaphone for
various socio-political sentiments; art as an aesthetic phenomenon
either did not come into the discussion at all or—on the few occasions
when it it did slip in—was promptly castigated as unacceptably
elitist.

The roster of speakers at the Clark included European and American museum
administrators, a sort of performance artist called Rirkrit
Tiravanija, a businessman, and an academic. It would be bootless to
say much about most of the presentations. For anyone familiar with
the sociology of the contemporary art world, it was simply
business
as usual: commercial acuity laced with political animus.
Michael Dorf, who founded a nightclub and popular Internet
web page called the Knitting Factory, was easily the most
articulate and amusing speaker. But it was by no means clear that
what he had to say about making money from the Internet
had
anything to do with art. Mr. Tiravanija recited a manifesto by
Claes Oldenberg while playing rock music and flashing slides
depicting his “work,” e.g., pictures of people making a meal and
eating it in a museum. Among other enlightening things, he told the
audience that he did not see why an institution that was supposed to
serve the public should ever be closed.

Mr. Tiravanija belongs to that large and growing body of artists and
critics who are bent on breaking down the distinction between art
and life. Thus he exhibits a replica of his apartment, invites
people into it, and calls it art. (It was not surprising that Mr.
Tiravanija should later advise the audience to “forget the object.”)
Similarly, Barbara
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, an academic at New York University with the
marvelous title
of professor of performance studies, announced in
the course of her paean to the making of a gigantic quilt
commemorating victims of AIDS that “simply everybody is an artist;
one doesn’t have to be a professional.” The only distinction between
art and life such artists and critics are sure to maintain is the
one determining who gets paid for declaring that there is no
difference between art and life.

Easily the most noxious presentation was by
Declan McGonagle, director of the newly created Irish Museum of
Modern Art in Dublin. Mr. McGonagle is an academic radical straight out of
central casting. Like some of his brethren in the IRA, his
favorite words seem to be “negotiation” and “renegotiation,” by
which he seems to mean “capitulation.” The museum as traditionally
conceived, Mr. McGonagle told us, was the product of nasty things
like “industrial capitalism” and a “privileged, white, Western
European” view of the world and of art. Like banks and nation
states, he said, the traditional museum was obsessed with “fixing
value.” “Fixing value” was something Mr. McGonagle was very much
against—at least unless it was he who got to do the fixing.
“Exclusion in support of excellence,” he told us, “is simply not an
option in Ireland, or anywhere else.” He did not say what he thought
about exclusion in the name of political orthodoxy. Mr. McGonagle
generously allowed that the antiquated, politically incorrect image
of the museum he excoriated should not simply be denied. Instead, it
should be brought to “the table for renegotiation at the end of the
twentieth century.” Adamantly opposed to the “hierarchical
narrative” put forward by museums as traditionally conceived, he
looked forward to a new kind of museum that would collaborate in the
“construction” of a new “narrative,” challenging tradition and
undertaking a “fundamental renegotiation of cultural and political
identity.”

As an example of the kind of “negotiation” he had in mind, Mr.
McGonagle described a project he supported that consisted of
billboards emblazoned with legends like “Execute God,” “Blast God,”
and “Kill God.” In part, he said, this was an effort
“to see if it was possible to make religious art at the end
of the twentieth-century.” With evident glee, he described
the reaction of “fundamentalist Catholic” organizations who attacked
the project, vandalized the billboards, and “accused us of
blasphemy”—a comment that elicited titters from an audience far too
sophisticated to believe in anything like blasphemy. Mr. McGonagle
professed to be surprised by the Catholic reaction. “We didn’t seek the
controversy,” he said—an observation that, since Mr. McGonagle is
not a stupid man, I have to put down to simple bad faith.

Most of what one heard at “Reimagining Museums for New Art” was the
usual postmodern boilerplate. Nevertheless, the
event was unusually
dispiriting, partly, I suspect, because it was held at the Clark Art
Institute, a handsome small museum in a handsome setting that, until
fifteen minutes ago, was content to preserve and exhibit its
collection and assist serious art historical scholarship. But the
Clark has clearly decided that being a serious museum is not enough;
it must also be “with it”: which means, in part, sponsoring
symposia where the traditional role of the museum is “interrogated”
by academic art administrators whose chief interest in art is as a
money-producing form of political theater.

It is a very odd situation. On the one hand, museums everywhere seem
determined to transform themselves into an extension of the
entertainment and recreation industry. On the other hand, behind the
coffee bars, video arcades, and Matisse T-shirts, more and more
museums are committing themselves to a radical revisionist program
that would have us view all art through the lens of political
activism. The result is what we might called cappuccino radicalism.

A few weeks ago, The New York Times ran an article on the front
page of its Sunday Arts & Leisure section called “Glory Days for the
Art Museum” by Judith H. Dobrzynski. Ms. Dobrzynski
informed readers that “It looks as if the
90’s are the age of the art museum in the United States, perhaps even
the golden age.” Although she contrasted the
contemporary “glory days” with the
“dark ages” of yesteryear when museums encouraged “contemplation” and
existed “primarily for elite visitors,” Ms. Dobrzynski did acknowledge
that “the age of museums is not to be
confused with the age of art or the age of art appreciation. Much
museumgoing is not about art at all. It’s simply social… . It’s
entertainment, not enlightenment or inspiration.”

Indeed. The problem, as seen by
Philippe
de Montebello, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of
Art and one of the few sensible voices heard in the museum world
today, is that what gets lost in this orgy of marketing and
entertainment is the experience of art. “The trouble,” Mr. de
Montebello observed, “is that works of art, for the most part, are
not fun. In fact, they can be difficult, challenging, even
provocative, and they don’t yield their message in the blink of an
eye—which is what is expected of people looking to have fun.
Seriousness, uplift, knowledge and, naturally, pleasure are what
art museums are meant to provide.” Of course, Mr. McGonagle & Co.
would be quick to agree that works of art can—
indeed, should—be
“difficult, challenging, even provocative.” But the challenge they
want art to deliver is fundamentally a political not an aesthetic
challenge. And as for aesthetic pleasure … well, that depends
entirely on the sort of discriminating excellence that Mr. McGonagle
and his fellow radicals insist should be dispensed with.
“As each day passes,” Mr. McGonagle said in the course of his talk,
“it becomes clearer and clearer that we are at the end of something.”
If he is right—and I fear that he may be— what we are at the end of is
the museum as an institution dedicated to the defense of the values
of civilization.