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Learning from the Guggenheim-Bilbao: Five Years After “The word is out that miracles still occur,” announced Herbert Muschamp’s caption of a glittering Guggenheim Bilbao on the cover of Sunday’s New York Times Magazine a month before it opened in October 1997, “and that a major one is happening here… ‘Have you seen Bilbao?’ In architectural circles, the question has acquired the status of a shibboleth. Have you seen the light? Have you seen the future?” That future is now. Five years have already passed since the momentous apparition and the time seems ripe to reflect critically on the influence of the Guggenheim on the world of art, architecture, museums, and urban renewal. What can we learn from “The Guggenheim Effect”? Architecturally, Gehry’s building was hailed as a “masterpiece” and “instant landmark” that brought a new sense of the relevance of architecture in the transformation of an urban landscape. “Gehry’s museum moves, it acts,” wrote Giorgio Romoli, “Its very form, the way it takes root in the environment, is the city’s ‘first cultural operation.’ The building recovers its own history: it laps up the river with confusedly organized ‘ship’s bow’ forms and materials… that recall the breadth and grandeur of the Bilbao shipyards, the center of the city’s industrial and commercial greatness for five centuries.” It was the story of the architect as hero and, as Greeks believed, of architecture as the first art—arche. Bilbao was doing for the Basques what the Sydney Opera House had done for Australia. Gehry, who complained of being “geniused to death,” became not only the master architect but the master artist. “Why all the hoopla?” Hal Foster wondered in the pages of the London Review of Books (August 2001), while castigating Gehry’s museum for risking the most problematic aspects of modernist monumentality and postmodernist faux populism. Allan Sekula added: “In effect, what it imports to Bilbao is an aesthetically controlled, prismatically concentrated version of the high specularity characteristics of the Los Angeles cityscape.” In the museum world, Thomas Krens’s media-driven transnational concept, with rumored satellites everywhere, has been the historic novelty of the 1990s—the “new patent” that promised to transform the institution as such. Initially derided as “McGuggenheims” by some critics, the success of Bilbao provided respectability to Krens’ plans. Its “strong operational synergy” means that Krens determines everything from New York: the works to purchase, the exhibits to organize, the artists to promote. The post 9/11 world, however, appears to have cut Krens down to his pre-Bilbao size—his SoHo and Las Vegas branches have already closed, the Internet museum evaporated, and the new Gehry East River Guggenheim in Lower Manhattan definitively abandoned. Even the New York Times, the leading promoter of the East River Guggenheim museum with its front-page news and editorials, admitted in its January 3, 2003, editorial that times have changed. If “for a time, in the 1990s, the Guggenheim looked like the brand to beat in the museum world,” now that “many of these projects have shipwrecked” it was apparent that “the Guggenheim was sometimes running, like Alice, as fast as it could to stay in one place.” The newspaper welcomed the rescaling of the museum to “make it possible to concentrate on the task of exhibiting art, rather than multiplying like so many Benettons.” Indeed, where is the art? That has been perhaps the most damning question about the krensification of the museum. Echoing Magritte’s parodic pipe that is not a pipe, it could be said of the global Guggenheim that is not a museum; but it is also a museum, and it is also about art. Key to the krensification of the museum, and following the lead of illustrious predecessors such as Thomas Hoving, there is now the blockbuster exhibit. The implication is that, in order attract large masses, something more than mere art is likely to be needed—hence the love for clothes, machines, historical periods, more of Gehry himself, or Brazil. If Malraux proposed a museum without walls, Guggenheim Bilbao presents a museum that is hardly anything else. The art itself becomes a sideshow in the overall museum experience which must be fun. This requires an institutional view that goes along with Krens’s honest definition of the museum as a “theme park.” Las Vegas is therefore the perfect place for the new museum/theme park, and the museum-goer must discover that “old Europe’s” Venice has been replaced by the upscale Venetian in the Nevada desert. To Peggy Guggenheim’s modernist love for decadent Venice with authentic art, Krens opposed his postmodernist love for a fake Venice in Las Vegas with exhibits of motorcycles and Armani clothes. Who is truer to her/his times? After Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour, we are learning from Las Vegas all over again. > To page 2 |
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• Introductory Statement • Organizers •
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