When the Museum Becomes an Event

For their first 200 years, art museums were powered by one of two driving ideas. First came the art museum as treasure house, an accumulation of rare and wondrous objects gathered together from far and wide for delight, delectation and--as often as not--as a stark symbol of the power of whoever happened to be doing the accumulating.

Then came the museum as connoisseur. Once all those rare and wondrous objects began to be assembled, there soon arose an obvious need. A voice of authority was required, one capable of scrutinizing and articulating just where the object came from, who exactly made it (and why), what shape it gave to the society that produced it and what relationship, if any, it might have to all those other treasures in the house.

These two tasks were the standard business of art museums for most of their still relatively young life. The last quarter-century, however, has witnessed the slow but steady emergence of a third priority, and it’s one that has come to be an increasingly powerful force. Treasure hunting and connoisseurship have been joined by popular entertainment as a third reason for the art museum’s existence.

This new priority is not necessarily a bad thing. Entertainment gets a bad rap as diversionary distraction, a shallow Pied Piper ostensibly leading us away from the serious things in life. But try telling that to Shakespeare or Bernini, who managed to make extremely entertaining art.

Entertainment’s dual responsibilities are to hold interest and give pleasure. Why this should be considered a minor achievement is anybody’s guess--especially for art--although American Puritanism is one likely culprit. But art is not brain surgery, nor the answer to perennial problems like war or world hunger. As art critic Peter Schjeldahl once put it, the spiritual trick of the great artist (and the great art lover) is to be passionately committed to something that isn’t that important.

Passion and perspective--keeping them in balance is no mean feat. So, as for any new priority, the art museum as popular entertainment venue is fraught with missteps. Some have been doozies. Perhaps the biggest came at the beginning, with the very first museum designed from scratch as an entertainment center.

Declaring his desire to erect “a department store for culture,” Georges Pompidou, the otherwise dull president of France, set into motion a process that would change forever the way art museums operate in the world. In the wake of the tumultuous student revolt of 1968, the established idea of an art museum as treasure house and connoisseur was in utter disarray. Nine years later, when the great Tinkertoy of a building designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers opened in the medieval Paris neighborhood of Plateau Beaubourg, the Centre Georges Pompidou announced the arrival of something new.

Beaubourg was the first Event Museum. An Event Museum is one in which the experience of “going to the museum,” as distinct from the experiences offered by the art inside, is the chief attraction. In the silvery gray light of Beaux-Arts Paris, the brightly colored, rough-and-tumble industrial metaphor designed by the architects was a veritable shock. The building looked like a cartoon-style factory, with the usually hidden innards characteristic of any modern urban structure here exposed as a decorative outer shell, painted in vivid yellow, red, green, blue and white. With its library, avant-garde music institute, cinematheque and art collections, Beaubourg took the visual form of a playful culture factory.

The greatest symbol of Beaubourg’s new status as an Event Museum was its escalator, encased inside a clear glass tube and snaking up the side of the building that faces a big, sloping plaza. The escalator brought visitors up to the roof for a breathtaking view over Paris. The ceremonial staircase characteristic of an old-style museum had been transformed--into something from the very department store Pompidou had declaimed.

You didn’t even need to go inside the art museum to ride Beaubourg’s outdoor escalator--and indeed most visitors didn’t. It was just as well. Inside, the museum was a mess.

Piano and Rogers’ design was meant to provide completely flexible interior spaces, unencumbered by the structural guts that were now decorating the exterior. But Beaubourg’s great collection of modern art, strongest in painting and sculpture from the first half of the 20th century, had mostly been created for rather narrowly proscribed domestic interiors. Easel paintings and pedestal sculptures looked adrift in the convention-hall interior of the new museum, with its flimsy movable walls and hollow-sounding floors.

People were well-served by Beaubourg, even if art was not. And people came in droves--from Day 1, four times as many people as had been planned. Shabby and disheveled after just 20 years, Beaubourg closed for complete renovation in 1997. It reopened last New Year’s Eve.

People are still well-served by Beaubourg, and art still isn’t--though it’s better now than it used to be. A recent visit shows that sticking traditional museum galleries into Beaubourg’s immense interior voids can only do so much. In the end, violating architectural integrity never really works.

Notably, the symbolic escalator has been altered. No longer can a visitor amble on and ride to the top, using the museum as a glamorous pedestal on which to stand and look out over Paris. Now, if you want to ride the escalator, you’ve first got to buy an admission ticket to the galleries.

Beaubourg’s 1977 debut shook the art museum world like no other building before it. In one dramatic gesture it created a tourist landmark, transformed a run-down urban neighborhood and changed the way we think about art museums and their entertainment potential. Beaubourg’s escalator even became a sort of template for the next great Event Museum to be constructed--although with a certain twist.

The damnable trams that haul visitors up and down the Brentwood ridge where the event-minded Getty Center stands are probably not damnable to the millions of carefree tourists who ride them--only to art lovers actually living in L.A., who must undergo the transportation hassle any time they want to see an exhibition or visit a favorite work of art. Like the tourists who flock to Beaubourg, those who come to the Getty still use the museum as a monumental pedestal from which to gaze out over breathtaking views. From there Los Angeles and the Pacific look sublime, even if the collection in the galleries remains spotty and weak.

As the first Event Museum, Beaubourg definitively unhinged the connection between art and museum that was central to the museum as treasure house or connoisseur. It showed how success, registered as inarguable entertainment value, could have next to nothing to do with actual works of art. The Getty Center added a billion-dollar exclamation point.

The Event Museum’s disconnect from art reached its zenith in 1997. In the year Beaubourg closed for renovations, New York’s Guggenheim Museum opened a branch in northern Spain. Like Beaubourg, the Guggenheim Bilbao’s astonishing building created an instant landmark beckoning international tourism from the covers of every magazine and newspaper in the known universe, while also igniting the fuse of local urban renewal. What it did for art is another matter.

Essentially, it did nothing. One big difference separates Bilbao from its Beaubourg precedent. The Paris museum houses an amazing collection of modern art, goofy galleries or not, but the Guggenheim Bilbao doesn’t. Without a great collection you may be many things, but you are not a great art museum.

Thomas Krens, the Guggenheim director who pioneered the franchising of the New York brand to cities abroad, is fond of saying what museum directors always say when on the make for grand expansion: Only a small percentage of the museum’s collection can ever be on view, while the rest languishes unseen in storage, so we need to build another building. What directors rarely admit is what’s more often the truth: Only a small percentage of any museum’s collection should be on view, because only a small percentage is truly exceptional. What remains in storage is significant for other reasons--research, contextual analysis, accommodating fluctuations in taste--all of which are essential to a museum’s non-entertainment functions.

As an Event Museum the Guggenheim Bilbao is a brilliant success, but as a treasure house and connoisseur it’s a bust. The random fragments of the Guggenheim collection in its galleries look bereft, as forlorn as any of scores of humdrum provincial museums the world around, while the program of temporary shows has been mostly dull. The museum has been averaging 1.2 million visitors a year--more than three times the population of its out-of-the-way city--and a reported 70% of those tourists say they came to see the magnificent building.

Beaubourg, Getty, Bilbao--is the Event Museum simply incompatible with the art museum’s traditional functions? Success in balancing popular entertainment with the demands involved in the care and study of great works of art has thus far been elusive. But there’s light on the horizon.

The museum that might finally turn out to signal the maturity of the Event Museum is London’s brand-new Tate Gallery of Modern Art. Brainchild of director Nicholas Serota, the 100-year-old Tate has just moved its 20th century collections into a massive, industrially chic, beautifully renovated power station on the south bank of the Thames.

Like Beaubourg before it, Tate Modern is a dramatic gesture. An instant landmark for tourists, it has also fueled gentrification of its run-down urban neighborhood. And like its predecessor it has an exceptional collection of modern art--though more from the second half of the century than the first. Where it departs radically from Beaubourg is in the seamless fit engineered between postwar art and postindustrial museum galleries.

Artistically, Serota is the anti-Krens. He opened Tate Modern with all 150,000-plus square feet of exhibition space devoted to the prodigious permanent collection. Although arguments can be had about specifics of the inaugural installation, they are arguments about art. While the Guggenheim chief knows that a spectacle will always draw a crowd, the Tate director appears to have found a spectacular way to draw the crowd to art. In our entertainment age, the Event Museum finally seems to have found its authentic voice.