The past two decades have witnessed a worldwide boom in modern and contemporary art museums. In London and New York alone, the Tate Modern Switch House, designed by Herzog and de Meuron, opened on the Thames in 2016, and the new Whitney Museum, conceived by Renzo Piano, appeared on the Hudson in 2015. Further uptown in Manhattan, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has undergone another expansion, this one guided by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, while the Metropolitan Museum of Art mulls over a new wing of twentieth-century art with David Chipperfield Architects. These are very different institutions, but all museums that aim to encompass modern and contemporary work face similar problems, and not all are economic or political in nature.
The first dilemma involves the different scales of this art and the different spaces needed to exhibit it. The initial setting of modern painting and sculpture, produced as they typically were for the market, was the nineteenth-century interior, usually the bourgeois apartment, and the initial museums for this art were scaled accordingly, often in refurbished rooms of a similar sort. Gradually, this salon style of exhibition was displaced by another type: as modern art became more abstract and more autonomous, it called out for a space that mirrored its own homeless condition, a space that came to be called “the white cube.”1 In the 1960s this model was pressured in turn by the expanded size of ambitious work, from the serial objects of the Minimalists to the site-specific and postmedium installations of subsequent artists. To hold together the delimited galleries for modern painting and sculpture with the large halls for contemporary production is no easy task, as any visit to Tate Modern or MoMA attests.2 And the problem is further complicated by the demand for yet another kind of space, an enclosed area darkened for film and video projection that is often termed “the black box.” Finally, with the renewed interest in performance and dance presented at museums, these institutions need still other galleries, which an early proposal for the MoMA expansion named “gray boxes.” (This apparent hybrid of a white cube and a black box is called “the studio” in the final plan.) Any museum that intends to show a representative array of modern and contemporary art must somehow allow for all these settings and do so in one building or one ensemble of buildings. This is not simply an architectural problem (which is not impossible to solve in any case); it is a collective question, involving directors and curators as well as artists and critics, about how best to display artworks that are not only disparate but often antagonistic (and intentionally so). A big tent should not flatten the different positions that it aims to shelter.
Two factors were central to the recent expansion of modern and contemporary art museums. In the 1960s, as industrial production began to collapse in cities like New York, manufacturing lofts were turned into inexpensive studios by artists such as the Minimalists, in large part because they wanted to produce work that would test the limits of the white cube. Eventually, however, disused industrial structures like warehouses and power stations were refashioned as new galleries and museums in order to cope with the increased size of this art. A circularity thus emerged, as is evident at institutions such as Dia:Beacon (2003), a mecca for Minimalist and Post-Minimalist art in upstate New York, which is an old Nabisco box factory transformed into a sequence of vast spaces to encompass large sculptures by Michael Heizer and Richard Serra (among others). This was the first road to expansion. The second was more direct: the building of altogether new museums as immense containers for huge artwork, as exemplified by the Guggenheim Bilbao (1997) by Frank Gehry. In some ways this bigness was the outcome of a space race between architects like Gehry and artists like Serra, and by now it seems almost natural to us.3 Yet there is nothing definitive about it, and many significant artists over the last two decades do not require such space, and some actively eschew it.
The Guggenheim Bilbao remains the primary example of a third problem as well, the museum as sculptural icon. Leaders of a depressed city or an overlooked region aim to retool for a new economy of cultural tourism and believe an architectural symbol that will also serve as a media emblem can help them toward that end. To achieve this iconicity, however, the chosen architect is allowed, even encouraged, to model idiosyncratic shapes at urban scale, often near poor neighborhoods that are badly disrupted as a result. In the process some museums become so sculptural that the art can only arrive as a secondary act; this is the case, for example, at the MAXXI (Museum of 21st Century Arts, 2010) in Rome, a neo-futurist plaiting of low-slung volumes designed by Zaha Hadid. Meanwhile, other museums seem so performative that the artists have to attend to the architecture first; this often seems to be the situation at the Institute of Contemporary Art (2006) in Boston, created by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, so ingenious is it as a machine for spectating. Of course, architects operate in the visual arena too and can hardly be begrudged for doing so. Nevertheless, when museums stand as the dominant work on display, they tend to upstage the art that they are meant to present.
Emphasis on design power can also distract from attention to basic program.4 This points to a fourth problem, which is a pervasive uncertainty about what contemporary art is and what spaces might be suited to it. How can one design for what one cannot anticipate? One upshot of this uncertainty is the rise of “culture sheds”; one such structure, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, with a great canopy on wheels that expands and contracts for different events, has appeared at the Hudson Yards, a mega-development on the west side of Manhattan.5 The logic of these sheds seems to be to build a great container and then to leave it to artists and curators to respond, and often the default is an overblown installation or performance or hybrid of the two. (This is a staple at venues such as the Park Avenue Armory.) Meanwhile, the projection of new spaces like gray boxes and art bays might constrain the very practices that they are pledged to support. What seems like flexibility can end up as the opposite; witness the tall contemporary galleries at the New Museum on the Lower East Side or at MoMA, which often overbear the art placed there. (As the entropic term suggests, gray boxes can also deaden the performances that are meant to animate them in the first place.)
From another perspective, these new and renovated museums might have a program after all, a mega-program so obvious that it goes unstated: entertainment. We still live in a spectacle society—our reliance on information has not diminished our investment in images—or, to use the anodyne phrase, ours is an “experience economy.”6 What relation do modern and contemporary art museums have to a greater culture that prizes the entertainment experience so highly? Already in 1996, Nicholas Serota, the longtime director of the Tate Museums, framed “the dilemma of museums of modern art” as a stark option, “experience or interpretation,” which might be rephrased as entertainment on the one side and aesthetic contemplation and/or historical understanding on the other.7 Over twenty years later, though, this either–or should not stymie us any longer. Spectacle is here to stay as long as consumer capitalism is, and museums must cope with the attendant expectations. However, rather than reiterate the immersive environments of spectacle, museum architecture might allow for spaces that support other sorts of subjectivity and sociality: not experience or interpretation, then, but rather both at once, with moments of reflection as well as intensity. Moreover, rather than embrace the presentist imperatives of spectacle, museum architecture must allow for access to multiple nows and thens, for if museums are not sites for different constellations of past, present, and future, why have them at all? Careful constellation is the key; cheek-by-jowl juxtapositions or far-flung wings do not suffice.
The past two decades have also witnessed a boom in private museums that house the artworks of the super-rich. (More than 200 have appeared since 2000.) Of course, there is a long history of private collections transformed into public museums, but this transfer is not truly complete in these cases. Frequently placed on estates at a remove from city centers (such as Glenstone in Potomac, Maryland), these institutions might be understood as heroic attempts to wrest contemporary art from the conditions of spectacle noted above—that is, if they were not symptomatic expressions of that same economy. The aesthetic commitment is often praiseworthy, but it is hardly disinterested, as contemporary art is a beautiful thing for collectors in several ways: auratic as an object, it is nevertheless fungible as an asset, and it is also difficult to appraise and thus to tax. Private museums come with tax breaks too, open as they sometimes are to visitors (who can afford the sojourn), yet finally these neo-aristocratic collections do not pretend to much connection to any public sphere.8 Indeed, such institutions, which can appear as so much equity display, equal parts prestige and portfolio, often compete for artwork with museums that are at least semi-civic.
Perhaps it is no surprise that, with massive inequalities in wealth, there would be a return of Gilded Age levels of cultural showcasing, which allows collectors to collect architects as well.9 Yet this return comes with a difference: whereas some robber barons were associated with a native city or a local region—from which they extracted economic value, to be sure, but which they also offered cultural largesse, in partial recompense—this is less often the case with most contemporary plutocrats. Such beneficiaries of a global economy feel largely free of specific contexts and civic commitments.10 So why do otherwise progressive architects design these monuments to neoliberal magnificence, and why do otherwise progressive artists fill them? For the financial support, of course. Yet, on this front, the old bugbear—when is money clean enough or, conversely, when it is too dirty?—is back with a vengeance, and it is especially urgent for art museums in the Trumpist era.