Priceless documents of civilization gleam in the calculated light of pricey trade as the very conditions of such displays collapse an object's separate trajectories as cultural trophy and valuable commodity toward a logical vanishing point where they coincide and identify the value of a possession with the worth of its owner.
Such new display strategies created the opportunities to break up the vast emporium-like character of collections in favor of prominently displayed key pieces--the prize piece worth a thousand others and taking their place--when these items were specially mounted, housed, lit, and labeled far viewing. This criticai transformation permanently altered the ambience of museums in a manner that would be hard to characterize more spontaneously than Queen Mary is said to have done when she visited a modemized installation at the Victoria and Albert Museum. "Wonderful, charming," she is reported to have said, adding, "such a pity, don’t you think, that everything looks as though it's for sale?"11
If the difference between the museum as shrine and warehouse is as much a matter of collection type as of building typology, the more recent manifestations, especially those of the cultural shopping mall, are the result of efforts to assimilate and elaborate the newest methods of display. It is the character and display of a museum's permanent holdings, rather than its architectural shell, that determine the qualities of the visitor's experience. With the advent of the cultural shopping mall, a new exhibition strategy provides both cause and justification for many aspects of its architecture: large traveling shows, not to mention the 'blockbuster exhibitions' offer constant blood transfusions, which museums of such massive frame require in order to stay alive in their communities. We must remember that these gargantuan shows originated in the era of universal expositions at a time of politically motivated propaganda, and that they continue to rehash notions of cultural superiority of one kind of art over another, just as they reinforce the familiar mystifications of artistic genius--hence their preponderantly monographic character--and genius loci, with pendant notions of the 'golden age' of this or that culture, and the 'treasures' of one country or another. In a word, the transformations we are witnessing have to do with the 'marketing' of the goods rather than with the wares themselves. Its methods are borrowed from modem merchandizing, which has found novel advertising and display techniques indispensable to success. Yet, the shopping mall has its fallacies too: one's heightened expectations are all the more sorely disappointed when one discovers that stores and boutiques tend to be standard from mall to mall, that the few atrophied urban devices in their layout are of the most hackneyed kind, and that one is most likely to forget where in the world one actually is inside a shopping mall.
The franchise stores we encounter in every mall suggested to Thomas Gaehtgens their cultural equivalent, the “franchise museum”.12 Not only has it become de rigeur for every self-respecting museum to have its obligatory Pollock, Rothko, Stella, Lichtenstein, Warhol, or Kiefer, but with the 'traveling' concept, shows, like trains missed at the station, can be caught at the next whistle-stop.
Words from a devotee of the blockbuster exhibition carry special weight in this regard: It was Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, who confessed that "art museum directors, at least in America, have become impresarios," for whom “boards of trustees exert enormous pressure for more and more popular shows to balance the budget..." Exhibitions, especially those with tickets, are like fixed performances and we are too often beginning to resemble the performing arts and visitor psychology has changed along with the museum. What is more absurd than for the director of the Metropolitan Museum to be asked as he so often is: "What's next at the Met?" Well, of course my immediate reaction is to say: 'The Magic Flute.'13 Yet, the absurdity of the question is only one of appearance, for the latest incarnation of museum culture has indeed assumed the guise of the spectacle. According to its aesthetic character, the spectacle is neither dependent on the individual worth of its ingredients, nor on the associative qualities of its venue, but on its performance alone. Hence, art of the newest kind--uncertain in its values and hors concour with the context--provides the ideal material for grand shows.
Neat graphic tables have their limitations, to be sure, but they do help us visualize complex relationships at a glance.
As we move from museums of long-familiar type to new ones, from the permanence of the tempie to the ephemerality of the stage, we find a corresponding shift in the visitor's disposition from devoted attention focused on a few canonie works to the heightened anticipation of a self-reflexive event in which all senses are engaged by the simultaneous, highly-engineered effeets ofour media culture. Shrine, Warehouse, Shopping Mall, and Stage identify at once the historical phases in the changing character of the 'ideal' museum, and integrate themselves in constantly varying degrees into the hyper-museum that is taking shape today:
The four basic museum types I have suggested, while they do constitute a historic sequence, also represent to a degree simultaneous options for today’s architects: at the very least they are considered such by the designers of the examples that will follow. The strain that results from tackling so archaic a type as the shrine is palpable in Stirling’s Sackler Museum at Harvard University. By contrast, the architects and clients who dared to return to the warehouse type did so, in the main, because of the particular nature of the museum’s collection and purpose. It is certainly no accident that the Yale Center for British Art (1969-1977) by Louis Kahn and the De Menil Museum (1981-1986) in Houston by Renzo Piano house major collections of a highly specialized kind: Yale received a bequest of the largest collection of English painting outside of the British Isles, whereas the De Menil collection must be counted among collections that are themselves true artifacts, embracing and juxtaposing objects whose variety and meaning reflect an interpretative order rather than any fixed set of historic categories. For both, study remains the single most important purpose in response to the large number and problematic nature of assembled works of art; in both cases, the patron’s unwavering insistence upon the purposes and demands of research--including provisions for libraries, study rooms for seminars, ample but fully accessible storage gave the emporium typology a new lease on life and obtained the purposeful flexibility of the exhibition spaces. Henry Cobb, too, was almost literal in his evocation of a warehouse for the facade of a museum (1978-1983) in the formerly bustling port city of Portland, Maine, combining behind its huge brick facade the modular volumes of the horrea with the legacy of John Soane’s lanterns for the Dulwich Gallery.
The warehouse transformed into loft space as the prototypical site of artistic production offered itself up as a ready context for the exhibition of new art, and when the planners of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles needed temporary exhibition quarters, they commissioned Frank Gehry to adapt a former car repair depot for the purpose. The Temporary Contemporary (1981-1984), as it is affectionately known, possesses a unique désinvolture, yet such unobtrusive practicality that it has remained indispensable long after the completion of Arata Isozaki’s permanent Museum of Contemporary Art.
Kahn’s Yale Center14 and Piano’s De Menil Museum command virtually unique standing among buildings of their respective generations. Reduced to an armature whose modular openings are filled--inside and out--with panels of metal, glass, or wood, and blocked into its urban lot like typical New England commercial buildings, the Yale Center even accommodates commercial shopfronts along the Chapel Street façade, as Schinkel’s Bauakademie building did in Berlin. It further shares with its Berlin counterpart the even number of bays on its elevations. What its façdes of six and ten bays help avoid is any hint of grand symmetry, stressing instead the additive order of a building whose function might be mistaken for a purely utilitarian one were it not for the extreme refinements that are elaborated in precisely the most industrial materials. One enters the building at a corner, informally, under an almost oppressively low but wide span, only to have the interior space suddenly soar up to the skylit roof three full stories above. And this takes us only into the forecourt: the large atrium of the museum is dominated by a massive cylindrical stairwell whose mute volume of sheer smooth concrete rises right through the hardwood floor.
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