Wow factor eclipses contents of new art museums

By JAY MERRICK

Jacques Herzog, designer of Britain's most successful art museum, the Tate Modern in London, has launched scything attacks on two of the Tate's greatest international competitors.

He said New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the world's most powerful fount of public art, was driven by a cynical and elitist strategy.

And in Bilbao, the Guggenheim Museum, designed by the architecture superstar Frank Gehry, left him cold because it was a "very bad example for museums in the future".

His remarks, made in the run-up to the Venice Architecture Biennale, stunned an otherwise demure seminar on the relationship between branding and art presentation, staged by the British Council and Brunswick Arts. The speakers included MoMA's Paola Antonelli and Daniel Libeskind, designer of Berlin's iconic Jewish Museum.

Herzog, 50, whose practice joined the international big league after the completion of Tate Modern, accused previous speakers of being "too polite" and insisted that museums such as MoMA were portraying art as decoration for buzzy lifestyles.

As for Bilbao's gleaming, titanium-clad repository, it was "just superficial. Take all that s*** out and cultivate it with ingredients from the city. Right now, it's like an alien."

Daniel Libeskind defended Gehry's masterpiece of crumple-zone architecture. But he conceded that shopping and museum experiences were becoming interchangeable, and that branding exercises were part of them.

Libeskind's Imperial War Museum North, which was recently opened in Manchester, was, like Tate Modern and MoMA's funky new QNS gallery in New York, the subject of extremely detailed branding exercises. These exercises came with expensively packaged press releases accounting for dozens of hectares of softwood forest, and triggered streams of gasket-blowing hyperbole.

Charles Jencks, one of the world's pre-eminent architecture commentators, sides with Herzog. He said Bilbao's hugely publicised museum was "partly cynical in that it was a global branding" and contained overblown exhibitions of American "lend-lease" art - a reference to America's postwar industrial financial largess to economically shattered European countries.

The Guggenheim, he added, planned to take over the art world, "like McDonald's". Since the Bilbao Guggenheim, "the game is about competitive buildings. It's a dangerous game."

And it's getting more dangerous. In America alone, there are at present more than 50 museum expansion projects worth a reported US$5 billion ($10.5 billion). For the moment, the Guggenheim organisation is the big hitter, planning to spend almost US$700 million ($1.47 billion) on a single new art museum in New York. Designed by Frank Gehry, its wow-factor will give MoMA something to think about, though probably in terms of pulling power rather than art.

The same syndrome exists in Britain where the Tate network - with galleries in London, St Ives and Liverpool - put the squeeze on smaller galleries. There are 82 small galleries in London alone. Some, linked to BritArt movers and shakers such as Charles Saatchi, can feed off the cool riffs emanating from Bankside.

But any dip in the economy could have exponentially destructive effects on many museums' tenuous pulling power. The warning evidence can already be seen in America, which is facing the prospect of recession. Among many threatened or delayed projects, the powerful Art Institute of Chicago has shelved its US$200 million ($422 million) makeover for two years. In Milwaukee, a dazzlingly skeletal new museum designed by the Valencian, Santiago Calatrava, is reported to be US$20 million ($42.2 million) in the red.

The line between art museum success and abject failure is paper-thin, and often mysteriously unpredictable. In London, Lord Foster of Thames Bank's architectural redevelopment of the British Museum's Great Court, with its vast Faberge bauble of a roof, has signally failed to suck in the punters; and that, in turn, has contributed to the museum's financial problems.

This shows that dramatic, rigorously hyped architecture doesn't always do the business for galleries and museums.

Daniel Libeskind, working on a cultural centre in Denver that will resemble a vast mall in mid-explosion, told the Venice seminar that research had shown "people don't know why they're in museums" - a crucial factor that has accelerated the growth of the retail experience that lies at the heart of most new-wave museums and galleries.

Nowhere in Britain is this clearer than at Tate Modern, where the brilliant lighting in its massive shop is in starkly ironic contrast to the Stygian gloom that characterises some of its gallery spaces. When an array of art books is more seductively colourful than a Van Gogh, something is wrong - regardless of the impressive visitor numbers.

- INDEPENDENT