Learning from the Bilbao Guggenheim The Museum as a Cultural Tool (original) (raw)

2005, Learning from the Bilbao Guiggenheim, Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno (Nevada).

That future is now. What can we learn from “The Guggenheim Effect”? The “miracle” referred of course to Gehry’s Bilbao masterpiece. Hailed as an “instant landmark,” it brought a new sense of relevance to architecture in the transformation of urban landscapes. It was the story of the architect as hero and, as Greeks believed, of architecture as the first art –arché. Bilbao was doing for the Basques what the Sidney Opera House had done for Australia. Gehry, while complaining of being “geniused to death,” became not only the master architect but the master artist. “Why all the hoopla?” Hal Foster wondered. Wasn’t Gehry’s museum risking the most problematic aspects of modernist monumentality and postmodernist faux populism? Thomas Krens’s media-driven transnational concept, with rumored satellites everywhere, has turned out to be, in the museum world, the historic novelty of the 1990s. They were initially derided as “McGuggenheims,” but the success of Bilbao provided respectability to Krens’s plans. The new museum’s “strong operational synergy” meant that Krens determined everything from New York: the works to purchase, the exhibits to organize, the artists to promote. Even if the post 9/11 world appears to have cut Krens down to his pre-Bilbao size—his SoHo and Las Vegas branches have already closed, his Internet museum evaporated, and the projected new Gehry East River Guggenheim in Lower Manhattan was definitely abandoned—there is a lot to be learnt from the “Guggenisation” of the museum in a period that has seen an unparalleled expansion of the number and diversity of museums. Beyond being repositories of works of art, exhibition sites, architectural landmarks, heritage narratives, museums embody as well various competing ideologies, historicities, practices of display and legitimation. The “Krensification” of the museum is one such historical structure that prompts questions as to what is its most proper public, what are its strategies of collecting, what discourse or spectacle has become hegemonic, what is really been displayed in Bilbao? Museums of contemporary art represent not only one of the most important architectural challenges in the public domain, but they also clearly reflect the ideas which underpin them. And although the museum is principally studied as regards its use, aesthetic demands, urban design and function, it can also be analyzed as an example of the institutional system of art. From this perspective one can speak both of the museum as a cultural instrument and about the museification of culture itself; and all this in a circular network where museums constantly reinvent their discursive strategies through their core functions: collection, conservation, exhibition and education.