Museum and Museums

Museum S.p.a. is not a book on the Guggenheim Museum or indeed on museums in general but a pamphlet that reveals the perverse mechanisms of art through the example of a museum transformed into a multinational. The museum in question was the New York Guggenheim and its diabolic planner a man named Tom Krens. The formula was simple and wholly in line with the times. Art was a commodity like all the others and to be exploited as such for profit. The speculative bubble was on target once again. The coupling of art and business was now acceptable and the Guggenheim began to open branches all over the world. But can art be treated like a Big Mac or a packet of Corn Flakes? What are the consequences of this absurd plan after the outbreak of the world-wide economic crisis? Paul Werner worked at the New York Guggenheim for nine years and went through this epoch-making change on the inside. A specialist in contemporary art, he was suddenly required to be an expert on everything from Chinese and African art to Armani clothes, motorcycles and even Vaseline. This short, incandescent text takes the lid off that bizarre postmodern museum to reveal its internal dynamics, shedding completely unprecedented light on the path that museums – all museums – have ended up taking over the last twenty years, a slippery slope whose disastrous consequences are clear today. On these ashes, with great acumen and fierce passion, the author indicates a new and exciting path towards a future yet to be constructed.

Inaugurated in May 2010 to great public acclaim, and placed in receivership in May 2012 for budgetary imbalances, the MAXXI is currently in the laborious process of getting back on its feet with a different board of directors. This text is a cautionary tale of over-ambitious projects, managerial shortcomings, erratic funding and  political decisions taken without a detailed analysis of costs and benefits for the community. In the incongruous position of being a state-owned museum run by a private foundation, the MAXXI was launched without a clear, convincing cultural raison d'être, compared to similar bodies which boast a greater social utility.Alessandro Monti reconstructs the political and bureaucratic implications of creating a museum "on paper", and the controversial aspects of an administration that had to contend with an excess of competing museum spaces and an unsuitable container: designed by renowned Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid at a cost to the Treasury of over one hundred and eighty million euro, the imposing concrete building has proved to be more spectacular than functional.This in-depth investigation of the MAXXI's crucial issues and weaknesses concludes with a series of possible solutions to the current problems, and various proposals to improve future performance, rethinking the Foundation's strategic priorities and overall game plan in organisational, operational and relational terms. Moving forward, it will be important to ensure greater transparency and get the staff more involved in the management of the museum, as well as taking a more selective approach to the exhibition programme, capitalising above all on the permanent collections and finally making the MAXXI a national landmark.

Do you have to set the Louvre on fire to establish yourself as one of the masters of your time? In order to answer this provocative question, in the 1960s the art critic Pierre Schneider invited eleven celebrated artists of the day, including Giacometti, Miró, Chagall and Steinberg, to accompany him one at a time through the museum’s sumptuous rooms. None of them refused the invitation and the truth that emerged still holds today. Far from torturing artists, the Louvre casts a spell on them that does not fade over time. Neither discouraged nor uplifted but if anything beguiled by the abyss separating them from the giants that live there, artists alone are capable of addressing them and entering into a dialogue between equals. Schneider records their every comment and gesture, even their silences and alternating moods, outlining the direction of their thinking in a few lines. Then, at just the right moment, comes the insidious question. The answers, sometimes scathing and sometimes admiring but never deferential, reveal uncommon acumen and great intimacy also with artists of a very different nature. We thus find Chagall unforeseeably moved by Courbet (“a great poet”) and irritated with Ingres (“too polished”), Giacometti enamoured of the Tintoretto self-portrait (“the most magnificent head in the Louvre”), and Miró onomatopoeically entranced, whistling with admiration at African mosaics. The eye of each glides over the works to plumb their material depths, comment on their “chemistry” and finally decide how they have stood up over time. These fascinating walks are informed by a spirit of reconciliation between old and new that explodes any notion of the museum as a warehouse of obsolete objects with nothing to say to contemporaries. The Louvre appears to its eleven extraordinary guests as a book from which you learn to read, a gymnasium to build up your strength, a school to hone your vision, the ideal cemetery, a time machine that eliminates millennial gaps, a bridge between past and present and above all the place where it is possible to address the greatest things created since the beginning of time.