Tom Krens, former director of both the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the Williams College Museum of Art, will be teaching a course in the fall called “From WCMA to Bilbao and Beyond: The Future of Museums in the Global Cultural Landscape.” Its focus is the phenomenon of the “new museum.” Drawing from his vast experience at the Guggenheim and in Europe, Krens will tease apart the concept that while the economic downturn has all but halted growth in public interest and appreciation of the arts in the U.S. and Europe, the new museum is taking root in the Middle East and China.
At a recent talk to a capacity crowd at WCMA, Krens—who studied political economy at Williams—explained that there is no such thing as a prototypical art museum. “The public art museum is an 18th century idea in a 19th century box,” he asserted. So while art may be bigger than life, museums need to be life-sized. “Art has to speak to the space, and vice versa,” Krens said of the lessons he learned while developing MASS MoCA in nearby North Adams. Visitors to that contemporary museum know that for the conversation to succeed, the space often needs to be capacious, he said.
Krens showed slides of projects under development in Austria, China, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, including museums that are the architectural grandchildren of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao, with their innovative and eye-catching design, though considerably larger. The key to creating the new museum, he says, “is the state.” In the case of MASS MoCA, he meant the state of Massachusetts, which provided a $35 million bond to build the museum. In the case of museums currently under development, he seeks buy-in from governments, making the argument that art museums bring immeasurable economic, aesthetic, and social benefit to the region. “New museums will be part of the global network,” says Krens. “They will be interconnected, and they will be conceptually elegant.”