There is a strange museum in Paris. It has no connection to artistic or cultural life, and is not well-known even to Parisians. It is not frequently visited and not often listed in guidebooks. If it is visited, than only by very special visitors – the blind. There are many different objects in the museum. Games for the blind, globes for the blind, various tables and training aids, created during the ages to give the blind some understanding of the world they cannot see. Many of these strange objects are beautiful. They are made of colored wood or polished bronze, but this beauty is invisible to the people for whom the objects were produced. The only clue to the appearance of these cubes, tables, letters and globes for the blind is their shape, or the coldness of the polished bronze or roughness of wood felt only by touch. To some extent, this respected French institution recalls a contemporary art museum.
Changes happening to art museums at the beginning of the 21st century are more visible in America than in other countries. In many ways, the transformation of the museum into a new form of entertainment industry was prepared by the experience and experiments of American museums during the last quarter of the 20th century. As with every serious change, it was not very noticeable in the beginning, when it was limited to the appearance of museum shops selling merciless kitsch to finance the institutions promoting »high art.« The revolution was hidden under the fig leaf »educational mission« of the museum, which was obliged to attract as many visitors as possible. Surprisingly, the same outdated excuse is often used today during the epoch of museum globalization.
As with every revolution, the »globalization« of the museum institution reminds some of previous historical cataclysms if not in essence, then in method. In order to understand the phenomenon of the »global Guggenheim,« it is necessary to look back at the history of the museum as an institution in general, and during the last century in particular.
The museum in its contemporary form was a child of the French Revolution, and one of the most powerful manifestations of a new bourgeois culture. The riches of royalty became the property of the people. Art produced for the chosen few started to be available to everyone. Because of this, the Louvre will remain for us the first museum of New Age. More than any other institution, it defined the role of the museum of fine arts as a democratic establishment, initiating an international process of profanation of art. At the same time, the institution symbolized the grandeur of the Napoleonic state, the most progressive Empire in the world and one meant to put an end to history, and for this reason received the title deed for all treasures produced by civilization.
The Louvre model dominated the European museum concept until the mid-20th century, when it culminated in the nightmare of unrealized projects as represented by the Hitler museum in Linz and the Super-Museum of World Art in Moscow: monsters, created in two countries which, like Napoleonic France, wished to write the last chapter in the history books. The fetishism of culture, which in many regards grew on the soil of the museums and was nurtured by bourgeois society, became an integral part both of the »rationalist« communist revolution on the stage of its Stalinist Termidor, and the »romantic« reactionary revolution of Nazism. Both Berlin and Moscow sought – as a symbol of the victory of the state and its ideology – the ownership of culture/civilization as manifested in the appropriation of art for establishing the biggest and tbest museum in the world.
The collapse of Nazi Germany and the exposure of its »art crimes« during the Nuremberg trials left the conventional museum world paralyzed. After the end of WW2, it became clear that the establishment of a new museum reflecting the whole history of art is impossible, just as »poetry is impossible after Auschwitz.« It seemed as if museums stopped being monsters and, like pagurians, returned to the historic shells of the old imperial palaces and the late 19th century historicist buildings, having lost the taste for dominating the world once and for all. Many of them became not only museums of art, but also museums of their own past, in the worst cases serving nationalistic sentiments and imperial nostalgia.
Another type of museum was on the march all over Europe and America – the museum of modern and contemporary art. The phenomenon of such museums was established in Russia immediately after the revolution. Representatives of the radical avant-garde, who just a few years before the end of the empire were calling for the destruction of museums and dreamed of »burning out the Sistine Madonna,« started their activities in the new state with the establishment of their own museum. According to their design, the new museum had not only to have branches in Petrograd and Moscow, but had to be transformed into a network of contemporary art museums spread all over the country. With the foundation of museums designed to display exclusively avant-garde artifacts, the new history of art started. However, both the history of modernism, and that of the museum created to represent it, inherited the illness of conventional art history and the museum practice of the 19th century. The new history of art recalled the old one in the same way that a reflection in a faulty mirror recalls the original. In the historiography of modernism, the positivist ladder of progress was transformed into the ladder of radicalism and »innovation,« (which, in the second part of the 20th century, provoked endless exhibitions called »From Manet to Picasso«).
By 1929 the Museum of Modern Art was established in New York. However, the American institution appeared at the precise moment when in Russia the very possibility of existence of art as an »autonomous practice was called into question and the existence of museums of avant-garde came to an end.
The Nazi and the Soviet prohibition of modernism gave new impetus to the creation of museums of contemporary art after the end of WW2. These post-war museums were called upon to serve two ideological purposes: in Europe in general, and in Germany in particular, they were a symbol of cultural de-Nazification, while all over the Western world they were the ideological institutions of the Cold War, designed to demonstrate the »freedom of creative expression« of which artists on the other side of the Iron Curtain were deprived. The establishment of such important exhibitions of international contemporary art as the Documenta in Kassel, near the East German border, made this visible through the breech sights of Soviet tanks.
The end of the Cold War, which practically coincided with the generally recognized end of modernism, deprived the contemporary art museums of their ideological functions. Compartmentalized into museums of everything which happened before post-impressionism and everything which happened afterwards, art museums became a mixture of educational institutions and tourist attractions without the clearly defined social function they had had before.
A new museum model was recently created in America. It was called the »global Guggenheim«; however, its formation did not start in the new Guggenheim, nor was it created by its current management, but rather during the 1960s – 1970s, when American museums struggled to overcome their »elitist essence.« One of the fundamental elements of this change was an invitation to commerce to enter the »temple of art.« The establishment of museum stores, which started as an American phenomenon, was soon exported to other parts of the world. At the beginning of the second part of the 19th century, when such a respected institution of capitalism as a department store opened its doors in Paris for the first time, it veritably mimicked a museum. »Bon Marché« was the first store literally open to the public. It was not necessary to buy anything there; it was enough just to look. If the museum was the beginning of the profanation of art, the department store began the profanation of luxury. The founders of the first department store saw one of its crucial functions as being »the elevation of the cultural level« of its customers/visitors, who could encounter »examples of good taste« during their strolls around the nicely decorated halls. The inclusion of art exhibitions and art galleries in the department stores became typical for the second part of the 19th century.
The second part of the 20th century produced another effect – the museum started to mimic the department store. This »transformation« was not only connected with the opening of museum stores, which soon took on a life of their own, leaving the museum buildings and spreading around the city (like the Met stores in New York) or on the internet; or just became stores without museums, like the Museum Store chain, branches of which can be found in every American mall; or like the »museumnet.store,« which is not attached to any particular museum.
Even the approach taken by the contemporary museum to its exhibits started to recall the tactics of the management of Macy’s or Bloomingdale. The culture of blockbuster exhibitions that began in the second part of the 1960s was created to attract public to the deserted museum halls. However, the early blockbuster exhibitions had an excuse – they were organized to obtain much-needed funds for the »quite« fundamentally scholarly exhibitions. Later, this excuse was forgotten. Blockbusters started to give birth to other blockbusters. Obsession with both publicity and public dictated the simplest criterion for such exhibitions – their potential popularity. Because of this, the material used for them in both classical art museums and museums of modern and contemporary art was basically limited to the sort of art works which during the 19th century were called »masterpieces.« However, the concept of a »masterpiece« was replaced during the last quarter of the 20th century by the concept of a »brand name.«
An interesting example of this new attitude is an object put on sale in the museum store during the blockbuster exhibition of Cezanne in Philadelphia a few years ago. The visitors of the show could purchase a strange souvenir which had a nearly surrealistic quality and could have been designed by Duchamp. It was a golf ball with a facsimile of Cezanne’s signature on it. Despite the fact that the great French artist never played golf and never manufactured equipment for this sporting game, the museum store found it appropriate to decorate balls with his name. It was possible because the name of Cezanne, like the names Rembrandt, Rubens, Breughel, Manet, Picasso, Duchamp, or Koons, had begun to be a sign of quality and a mark of luxury products.
Detailed research on the reduction of »masterpiece« to the level of »brand name« still has to be done, just as the use of classical art for advertising purposes still has to be researched. However, even now it is possible to conclude that »brandname-ization« offered the possibility to show, in a museum context, masterpieces turned into brand names, together with brand names that the museum tried to elevate to the level of masterpieces. Exhibitions of Armani or Harley Davidson in Guggenheim, or of contemporary Japanese textiles in MoMa, and finally the »Made in California« show organized by LACMA provoked a discussion in American press. Worried observers claimed that art museums are showing everything except art. However, the participants in the discussion didn’t notice the ideological trick of the commercialized museum, which not only helped in getting donations from the corporations whose products were exhibited, but tried to change the essence of such products. In reality, the museum attempted to transform Armani into »art« because it was a task of marketing policy. Transformation of art into »Armani« was just the other side of the coin.
Steve Wynn, the creator of the Belagio Art Gallery situated in the Las Vegas hotel of the same name, proved to be a marginalized genius of the new American museum. Just few years ago, it was difficult to imagine that respected museums would follow the example of the flamboyant millionaire. He can be compared only to Aristide Boucicaut, the founder of »Bon Marché,« the first department store in the world. Belagio Museum became the first museum in history where visitors were not only able to look, but also to buy – and to buy practically everything. Every exhibit in Belagio had its price tag – the complete union of the museum and the museum store was finally realized. The museum itself, situated in the midst of the capital of American entertainment, absorbed the characteristics of the entertainment industry. Open 336 days a year, 24 hours a day, Belagio became the model for the new museum experiments.
Transformation of museums into showcases for »objects of desire« camouflaged with the help of such outdated term as »art« recalls the situation in the Soviet museum world during the period of constructivism, when the concept »art is dead« became a general opinion of radical intellectuals. During that time, the definition of »material culture« was introduced in an attempt to replace the term »art.« We are living again in the epoch of »material culture« exhibited in the museum halls, but this time it is labeled as »art.«
Another sign of the new museum is the final alienation of a visitor with the help of audio devices, transforming museumgoers into a crowd of silent loonies, moving from painting to painting according to the order dictated by the explanatory tape. This process started before the introduction of audiotapes in the late 1960s – early 1970s with textualization of museum space achieved with the use of extended labelling, wall texts and various disclaimers. In this field, Americans were hardly the pioneers. The culture of textualization of the museum was developed in the USSR during the so-called museum reform that coincided with the first five years plan. However, Soviet curators had a totally different task to that of their American successors. Despite the fact that in Russia, as in America, the appearance of texts in museum halls was justified by citing »educational necessity,« its real function was the ideological interpretation of art, which had to be definitive, and was put in place to deprive visitors of any possibility of their own, possibly politically incorrect, interpretation. In Russia, such textualization of the museum reached the scale of Kafkaesque absurdity. At the beginning of the 1930s, the Treytyakov Gallery even published a special guide for its visitors on how to read labels and slogans. By that time, the gallery was using more than 50 different types of labels and disclaimers explaining »the class essence« of the exhibited art. A few years later, in 1937, text was used extensively during the exhibition of »degenerate« art in Munich for the same purpose – to give the final ideological interpretation of the exhibited art works.
In America, the temptation of »social determination« dominated for a short time, when the disclaimers on the museum wall explained in »politically-correct« style that native Americans depicted on the 19th century paintings of the Hudson school were oppressed by the whites; but then political correctness disappeared, while wall texts remained. Their new function was to give an easily digestible, simplified explanation of art that could be understood without unnecessary effort.
This simplification, which today has become a mark of computerized information, reduced in the main to the most elementary facts, became the first step in the adaptation of the museum to the needs of the »blind.« The explanatory texts aimed at a non-existent general visitor, whose cultural level was slightly higher than zero, but who had surprisingly succeeded in mastering the art of reading. With the introduction of audio tours, this contradiction ceased to exist. The myth about the »educational function« of the museum crumbled into paroxysms of vulgarization, which became the true fruit of the majority of educational activities.
Against the background of commercialization and simplification of the museum, the next step was done. At the end of the 20th century, two trends started to dominate American museum life. They can be defined as museum enlargement, and museum franchising. Many museums began to construct new wings or new buildings, and museums started to merge in a true corporate style (it is enough to recall the sad example of PC 1 merged with MoMa.)
It is possible to find a historical analogy to this process in the Soviet experience. During the »great break« of Stalinist industrialization, the conception of museum enlargement was treated as a cultural parallel to the centralization of the economy. Dozens of small museums were closed and their collections transferred to mega-institutions such as the Hermitage, the Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, etc.. In some cities, a united centralized management for all museums was established; in others, such as Kiev, special »museum towns« were founded – all museums were relocated in one place, so after visiting the anti-religious museums, proletarians could easily cross the street and stop by at the art gallery. (A situation which puts one strongly in mind of the new »museum town« constructed in the center of Vienna.)
However, if Soviet museum enlargement was dictated by a belief in the efficiency of the centralized economy, contemporary American museum enlargement looks like a reflection of the current policy of international corporations. In this sense, the Guggenheim is the best example of the corporate behavior dominating the museum world of today. The Guggenheim was the first museum institution which a) started to franchise itself, and b) created a strong corporate identity. Established as the museum of modern art, the Guggenheim for a long time lived a secluded life in the spiral of the Frank Lloyd Wright building, which, like many creations of architectural modernism, became the symbol of the future which never came about. However, under the new management, it started to export the Guggenheim model around the world. The Guggenheim-Germany and the Guggenheim-Bilbao became the first steps in the realization of the »global Guggenheim« project, as the officials of the museum call it.
The Bilbao project was extremely important, because it gave a corporate identity to the Guggenheim »multinational corporation.« This identity is the building designed by Frank Ghery, which has to reappear in the slightly modified version in the area of the New York sea port. Ghery succeeded in creating architecture without a function. His enlarged decorative sculpture, which houses the museum building, became not only the sign of the Guggenheim, but also the sign of the times. If André Malroux, playing with de-contextualization of art works, tried to create a »museum without walls,« Frank Ghery succeeded in creating walls without a museum. The only symbol of the Guggenheim-Bilbao is the building itself; and it makes no difference what is placed inside it – the Armani exhibition which is being shown there now, or the Malevich show, which will be exhibited their next year. Ghery’s architecture became as important for the Guggenheim as the »golden arches« are for McDonalds, or the Star Buck maiden depicted on the paper cups is for the coffee emporium.
Ghery’s style is not just the symbol of the »global Guggenheim,« but also the symbol of the contemporary American museum in general. Unfortunately, the Guggenheim does not own Frank Ghery, so his gifts can also be used for the creation of the building of »The Experience« Rock-and Roll Museum in Seattle, financed by Bill Gates, or for the new wing of the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington, D.C. If, in Seattle, Ghery’s architecture has to create just a »contemporary identity,« in Washington it is called on to help the faceless institution with a vague program to establish the »contemporary museum identity«: to elevate it nearly to the level of the Guggenheim.
The Guggenheim didn’t limit its efforts to franchising. Recently, the museum signed cooperation agreements with the Hermitage and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna . At first glance, the choice of such partners looked strange. What could unite the museum established as the symbol of modernity with two old imperial institutions amassing unique collections of classical art? The management of the Guggenheim explained this contradiction – Rembrandts from St. Petersburg and Breughels from Vienna will be exhibited in the Guggenheim facilities in New York. (The new building will include the special »Hermitage rooms.«) However, New York will be not the final destination for the old masters. In the Venice hotel in Las Vegas, the Guggenheim is planning to open a branch to show the treasures of the Old World. The lesson of Mr. Wynn was used and gave birth to the new institution.
The idea of placing Breughels in the new Ghery building in New York sounds insane; however, the Guggenheim has the chance of becoming the first institution to put an end to the division of art history started by modernism, a division which today appears simply archaic. However, in this case, the end of the dual history of art will be triggered not by the necessity of revising these outdated ideas, but by the dictates of the market.
The global Guggenheim with its »brandname-ization,« simplification, commercialization and franchising corresponds to the worst nightmare of the American-style »globalism« sung by Thomas Friedman in »The Lexus and the Olive Tree,« and described by Aldous Huxley in »Brave New World.« This globalized and commercialized museum has every chance of becoming the perfect »museum for the blind« – the first cultural McDonalds of the 21st century. Maybe putting »The Blind Leading the Blind« by Pieter Breughel on display in such a museum could be more than appropriate.