museum, inc
inside the global art world
by Paul Werner
Chicago:Prickly Paradigm Press
musée & cie (version française)
more writing
Excerpt:
Introduction
Actually, I kinda liked Tom Krens.
Krens, should this book wash up on future shores, was Director of the Guggenheim Museum throughout the ‘nineties. He found a new way of thinking about museums without thinking about art, but he thought about museums so thoughtfully that by the beginning of the twenty-first century there were Guggenheim branches all over the world (Venice, Berlin, New York, Bilbao) with unfinished or failed projects in New York, Las Vegas, Salzburg, Rio, Taiwan—or was it Guadalajara? Krens was widely hailed or hated as the “CEO of Culture, Inc.”: the man who was doing for the Art World what the new monster corporations were doing to the Global Economy.
I'm glad I worked at the museum and not for the monsters. But I learned a few things about the monsters, too, because there were parallels: the Guggenheim behaved like a corporation, and corporations thought of themselves as Beacons of Humanity.
It's nothing personal. I rarely saw Krens, spoke to him only once, and he never spoke to me except near the end when someone must have told him you're supposed to make eye contact with the crew when the ship is sinking. Then again, I spent nearly nine years at the Guggenheim as a Gallery Lecturer, an independent contractor on call to talk about Contemporary Art, Chinese Art, African Art, architectural models, motorcycles, Armani clothes, Vaseline and just about anything else Krens qualified as Art. So why not play the expert on the Museum itself, and museums in general? The best expert at figuring out what the boss thinks is the one working under him, especially when the boss doesn't know what he's thinking anyhow. Like every worker I specialized in the area least discussed: the institution itself.
It was fun. I earned a little, learned a lot, and it's time to clear out the desk in my mind. And if in the end my collective employer turned into a corporate cretin—well, even the consciousness of cretins is determined by social circumstances and it is necessary to understand those circumstances in order to educate the cretin. Think of this book as a gallery lecture, moving up a gently rising ramp, haphazardly it seems, from one image to the next. Section One describes the museum system at the end of the twentieth century—the what, if you will; Section Two, the strategies used to enforce the museum's agenda—the how; Section Three describes Krens' tactics: how these strategies were applied, and failed, and haply will fail some more, as they're shown to do in Section Four, Conclusion. Reader, see yourself moving up a huge spiral, looking down, and up, and sideways, at the same ideas from a changing perspective. Think of a giant inverted cone rising to the heavens, ideas insensibly moving from contradiction to contradiction, thesis against antithesis at a five-percent incline, rising, insensibly rising in a widening gyre…
© Paul Werner 2005