Krens' Footprints and Oteiza's Paradox

Oteiza’s paradox consists in that while New York’s world-class artists will consider him as their equal (Serra conceded to a reporter that he thought Oteiza was the greatest living sculptor, and Gehry called him one of the three or four fundamental artists of the century), the Krensified franchise museum will reduce him to a local artist whose value is seen as quite negligible.

But Oteiza is only one instance of this paradox. The same thing happened to the great Eduardo Chillida. Initially, when Basque critics charged that there would be no work by Basque artists at the new museum, Krens always countered that one gallery would be devoted to Chillida. But then he refused to buy Chillida’s work. When the Guggenheim was about to open its doors in Bilbao, a snubbed Chillida had to complain in the Basque press that Krens was unwilling to purchase any of his work—purchases that, needless to say, would be done with Basque taxpayers’ money. Krensification means that the museum mandarin from New York has the right to levy money for the purchase of art from the host society and then spend these public funds of the franchised public the way he best pleases. If this implies humiliating the most consecrated local artist, then so be it.

But the key lesson for local artists to be learned from Chillida’s case is something else. It has something to do with the repositioning of the artist as deserving a global or local audience. Chillida clearly belonged to the international elite art community when New York’s Guggenheim exhibited his work in 1981. Then the Guggenheim purchased Chillida’s work. But in the 1990s and in his home Basque Country, was he still a global artist whose work deserved to be collected? Krens decided that he was not. Suddenly, in the eyes of the Guggenheim, Chillida had become a minor artist unworthy of his interest. His work did not deserve the new museum’s international space. When I asked Krens about it, his cryptic reply was that his modus operandi was to buy two works and receive one for free. In other words, Chillida was unwilling to bend to the Krensified museum’s patronizing rules and had been punished for it.

Joseba Zulaika
"Desiring Bilbao: The Krensification of the Museum and Its Discontents"
in Learning from the Bilbao Guggenheim
pp. 158-159

Besides a "paradox," I also smell a rat: members of the "international elite art community" indeed stoop to the level of local yokels when they demand the "elite" treatment on the basis of their local origins. They reduce themselves when they deal in terms of honor and status at the expense of practical considerations. They reduce themselves when institutional conduct "implies" things about them rather than does things to (or for, or with) them. In my home town, a long way from Bilbao in geographic terms, even the nonelite like to turn this trick. I have since grown to despise it.

If art itself shows a "tendency to reproduce something absent" (O. Rank), then so too must we permit the audience to meet their own "dynamic need of equalization" via occasional indulgences in novelty. Behemoth art franchises can suck all the air out of the room, but they also (and this too is something of a paradox) are importers of rare goods otherwise unavailable locally. Infusing more local work into these behemoths is the worst of both worlds. That is not their ecological function. Use them to equilibriate yourself as needed! Otherwise ignore them! Nobody can "humiliate" you without your permission! Not even a Yale MBA!

It's hard to take seriously the notion that "the Krensified franchise museum" is either necessary or sufficient to "reduce" an "international elite" artist "to a local artist whose value is seen as quite negligible" on the local level. Anything ever-present will be taken for granted. There is more than a ring of truth to the notion that a prophet will never be recognized in his own land. There is also a material reality, a reality which transparently unethical behavior by the gatekeepers (and there does seem to have been some of that here) can too easily obscure. When the local scene's greatest export demands to be acknowledged in every local endeavor (as many of them do!), he himself has become the behemoth who sucks all the air out of the room. Frankly, there is no "key lesson for local artists" here that they do not learn quickly on their own. Perhaps it is only elite success which causes them to forget.

(Please forgive my indulgence in masculine pronouns here on the grounds that the principals happen to be men. True "murderous rage" over the failure of a project is such a guy thing, no?)

---

As MASS MoCA evolved into an element of the Guggenheim Museum's expanding international network, it raised the issue of the cultural preservation or homogenization of local identities. Would a conceptual museum of avant-garde art overshadow the humble folk art traditions of North Adams? Would the preservation of the old factory buildings also preserve a local working-class identity? Under any circumstances, making a museum the arbiter of local identity risks undermining the cultural understandings that support any social community. In a fragile economy, making that community financially and emotionally dependent on a transnational museum adds irony to tragedy.

Avant-garde art is usually associated with metropolitan centers. It diffuses slowly to other areas. Tourism may accelerate this process, as it did with modern music and dance in the Berkshires, but it does so within limits. Local museums outside a metropolitan setting rarely present avant-garde works. They perform educational and curatorial functions. They commemorate local histories. They preserve fossils found on native soil, paintings and sculptures by regional artists, and encyclopedic—rather than topical—displays.

We do not know whether Conceptual and Minimalist art, and its descendants in feminist and other installations, can command an audience in rustic or humble surroundings. Until now, the summer visitors who patronize arts festivals in the Berkshires come for mainstream modernist and Impressionist works. They fill evenings in their vacation schedules.

The MASS MoCA proposal essentially argued that space does not matter: art can be appreciated anywhere. The North Adams site was a "museum of space," in one meaningless expression, which meant that it was to be considered an outpost of global culture rather than a local social institution. Thomas Krens theorized that visitors would go to North Adams to see a definitive display of a highly specific art that was created elsewhere. While this strategy works for the Guggenheim's core museum in New York and the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, few people thought it would work for North Adams. But who creates the social and spatial context in which a specific cultural strategy "works"? Could avant-garde art "work" without a critical mass of avant-garde artists to produce and view it, without a public already trained to "see" it?

Sharon Zukin
The Cultures of Cities (1996)
(pp. 103-104)

"Outposts" are indeed no substitute for (and can be highly destructive of) "local social institutions." About that there is no doubt. But again, the Localist Paradox: access to "global culture" is a necessity and a human right which "local social institutions" can't always provide. Bollocks on any art czar who would banish "global culture" from "rustic or humble surroundings!" Or vice versa!

Zukin's gambit here is very much a "populist resistance to change," though she has earlier written of that orientation as if it were someone else's and not her own. "Avant-garde art is usually associated with metropolitan centers." Fine. But to question in this context whether "art can be appreciated anywhere" the volk are not "already trained" (Yikes!) I find rather shockingly contemptuous of these ruralites. I for one can say that I've seen some rather remarkable things happen in some rather unlikely places. Yes, I have seen truckers sobbing openly after a free jazz blowout, and I have seen rural children stage a swoon-in over a brass quintet. Certainly I have not seen these things everywhere I have performed. I have never seen anything like them in the city! Supply and demand is not too facile a construction here! Localism reproduces something present!

Appreciation by everyone, everywhere, all at once, is not the point. Also not the point: giving people exactly what they say they already want, or more of what they already have. Probably North Adams did not need a whole Guggenheim, but I'll bet that someone in North Adams needed modern art, and damned if they didn't get some!
---
Local and personal reality is always more granular than a distant consumer of print can do justice to. Both the genius and the folly of print is how impersonal it can be. None of what I write on matters such as these is to be taken "personally," but I realize that it cannot help but be taken this way. I happen to recognize many elements of these stories even though I have never been to Bilbao or to North Adams. Such public-facing print accounts are undoubtedly reductive; still, they are tools the rest of us can use to guide ourselves through similarly fraught territory. For me there are lessons here, just not the ones the authors explicitly state.