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What’s This Business about Culture Part4
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m40146The GuggEnron
If there is a single cultural institution that embodies misgivings about the corporate model it is the Guggenheim. Under the directorship of Thomas Krens, the New York museum has turned itself into a global franchise, opening ‘branches’ in Bilbao, Venice, Las Vegas (a Rem Koolhaas-designed space inside a casino) and Berlin (on the ground floor of a bank), while it actively seeks new sites worldwide. Krens’s strategy is to use the brand leverage of existing Guggenheim concerns to open new ventures, sharing the financing with local organizations and benefiting from the revenues. The Guggenheim bubble appeared to be bursting early in 2002 when the poorly-visited Las Vegas branch was threatened with closure after only a couple of months. Although Las Vegas does remain open, in recent years the volume of noise made by Krens has decreased considerably and plans for other Guggenheim outposts, notably those for a spectacular Jean Nouvel-designed building in Rio de Janeiro, appear to be stalled. Writing in the Village Voice, in February 2002, art critic Jerry Saltz called Krens’s institution the ‘GuggEnron’. The implication was that the director’s hubris was overriding concerns about artistic content and curatorial integrity. Outside the United States the museum franchise has been accused of cultural imperialism, attracting the tag of McGuggenheim.
One of Krens’s most controversial moves was to stage a show of the work of the fashion designer Giorgio Armani, while at the same time allegedly accepting a donation from Armani of $15 million. The exhibition was poorly received and the museum was accused of allowing the prospect of financial gain to influence its curatorial policy. Krens continued to defend Armani as a suitable subject for an exhibition, but for many this episode is emblematic of what happens when sponsors are allowed to overstep appropriate bounds. The media mauling that Krens received stands as a warning to all ambitious, corporate-minded directors.
Whose Muse?
Between October 2001 and June 2002 a number of major international museum directors delivered lectures under the auspices of the Harvard Program for Art Museum Directors and the Harvard University Art Museums, called ‘Art Museums and the Public Trust’ (the papers were later published by Princeton University Press as a volume titled Whose Muse?). These lectures amount to a defence against the over-enthusiastic pursuit of the corporate model. Of course, American museum directors such as Philippe de Montebello of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Glenn Lowry of the Museum of Modern Art have always assumed the need for private money, but they argue that the public’s trust in their institutions can only be earned by maintaining a barrier between commercial and curatorial activity. The anti-hero of many of the lectures is, unsurprisingly, Thomas Krens.
Invoking the notion of institutional integrity, a number of Whose Muse? contributors insist that art museums must pursue goals that are not accountable to empirical measures such as visitor numbers. The book’s editor James Cuno (who, at the time he hosted the series, was the Director of the Harvard Museums, and is now Director of the Art Institute of Chicago) argues in favour of the most traditional of museum experiences — that of the unmediated communion between viewer and object. He describes anything that might impinge on that experience — including the elements of identity design that are the subject of this book – as clutter. Although Cuno’s description of the meeting of art and its audience is extremely attractive, I can’t help feeling that the quality of the encounter that he describes is one that most of us need some help in achieving.
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