build it and they will pay

8/12/2019 Build It and They Will Pay

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BUILD IT AND THEY WILL PAY A PRIMER ON GUGGENOMICSby


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Guggenheim's garage, filled with outtakesfrom its vaults and sporadically supple-mented with exhibits on such subjects as mo-torcycles and Gehry himself (designed by thearchitect) months after they've been shown in

New York. What you won't see at Bilbao ismuch in the way of local Basque art, muchless new Spanish art.But the city does have a remarkable andshiny building. It sits on the banks of thefetid Nervion River where an abandonedlumber mill used to be, next to an elevatedhighway-a nice confluence of its architect'sfascination with urban misery and withmovement. The museum showcases a con-ventional American interpretation of themodern art canon, and it attracts a lot of in-ternational tourists who would otherwisehave passed Bilbao by. Once they have takenin the grandeur of Gehry's achievement, visi-tors may reflect on what a rum thing it is thatyou can travel the world over and see thesame packaged art shows, as if you were on atour of college freshman dorm rooms. Criti-cal observers might even be led to wonderwhy international museum culture remindsthem so much of international finance. Whyall these partnerships with Deutsche Bank,Hugo Boss, and Samsung?The man to know in this connection isThomas Krens. He is director of the Guggen-heim Museum in New York, a motorcycle-51

52THE BAFFLERriding, Yale-trained media-hound who for adecade has zoomed willfully over the mostsacred tenets of museum culture. Since tak-ing command in I988, Krens has sold offmajor paintings from the Guggenheim col-lection, staged exhibitions devoted to majorcorporate donors such as Armani, and floatedmassive bond issues, using parts of the collec-tion as collateral, to finance his network ofsatellites in Venice, New York, Berlin, andBilbao.Like other financiers, Krens has been over-


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reached himself a little bit of late. Surprised by the blow to tourism dealt by September II and the wider recession, and just after he'dopened two new Guggenheims in a casino inLas Vegas, Krens solemnly proclaimed late

last year that his new goal was to "go into2002 with a balanced budget." He fired 80employees (a fifth of his staff), immediatelyshuttered the SoHo Guggenheim, and prom-ised more layoffs to come. Upcoming ex-hibits were shelved, and an exhibit called"Brazil: Body & Soul" extended. Finance ex-

perts at other museums nodded their headsapprovingly as the Krens model of the debt-

burdened, centrally managed global museumchain seemed finally to have foundered onthe shoals of market austerity. Even the newFrank Gehry museum, due to be built on theformerly industrial piers of the East River inLower Manhattan, a project the Guggenheimhad boasted about for two years in a series ofFrank Gehry "exhibits," faced mortal danger.But in January 2002, with the Brazil ex-hibit still hanging in gloomy New York,Krens cheerfully jetted down to sunny Rio deJaneiro and, with that city's mayor at his side,announced the coming of a new Guggen-heim Brazil. The people of Rio had kindlyoffered to pay $2 million for a "viability"study and already generously set aside $I20million to build the museum, to be designed

by French auteur Jean Nouvel in the city'srundown port district. The Guggenheim hadinked the deal with Rio officials the previous

November, at about the time Krens was axinghis employees and murmuring somberly tothe press about the grim realities of austerity.

The contrast offers a wonderful illustrationof the harsh machinations at the heart ofGuggenheim economics-secure public fi-nancing for capital-generating museums in adecentralized network of deindustrializedcities, dump assets when necessary, and pun-ish workforces in the isolated cultural fief-doms as needed. In the hagiographic hysteriaof the bubble decade, the museum's expan-sion and relentless branding filtered down tous mortals as brave new architecture wrapped

in the noble rhetoric of urban renewal andart for the people. As it turns out, the "mira-


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cle of Bilbao" wasn't so much about a new,flexible architecture. It was about flexible ac-cumulation.Paired together, Krens and Gehry have per-haps had the largest single impact on the

modern museum in fifty years. While bothare cast as breaking totally with a pastdefined by fixed notions of a museum's rela-tionship to the state and even to form itself,their innovations are better thought of as ex-tensions of the logic of capitalism into thederegulated plastic economy of the Nineties.

No surprise, then, that Enron, that paragonof the bubble years, loved and paid them

both. As onetime CEO Jeffrey Skilling wrotefor the catalog that accompanied a recentEnron-financed Gehry retrospective:Enron shares Mr. Gehry's ongoing search for themomenr of (ruth, the momenr when the func-tional approach to a problem becomes infusedwith the artistry that produces a truly innovativesolution. This is the search Enron embarks onevery day by questioning the convenrional rochange business paradigms and create new mar-kets that will shape the New Economy. It is theshared sense of challenge that we admire most inFrank Gehry.The moment of truth has arrived. Krens'sglobal strategy rested on a simple innovation:

taking high culture down market by makingart accessible to the masses. But his shrewdestinsight was to recognize the profit potentialafforded by the drama of deindustrializationin struggling first-world cities. Curators at

big museums of modern art in the late Eight-ies could not figure out how to keep 20th-

Build It and They Will Pay 53century greatest hits on constant display whilealso making some gesture toward showingnew art. Krens solved the problem by ignor-ing the art altogether. By expanding the cura-torial style outside the museum walls, he real-ized that the scenography of broken citiescould be the art, stage sets for disseminatingthe thrill of gentrification to the masses. Youcould stretch the museum's current collection

to keep the branches filled, make up the diff-erence with high-concept traveling displays


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of borrowed art and consumer gadgets, keepoperating costs low by running the showfrom New York, and win cover charges fromtourists on the global circuit two, three, andfour times. True, only so many world cities

care to have their highbrow aspirations hi- jacked by a cash-hungry American interloper.But there were plenty of smaller cities rav-aged by capital flight eager to play along.From the architect's point of view, Krens'snew concept was irresistible. Consider whatBilbao did for Gehry's image. Once a mid-dling practitioner of mildly interesting office

parks and shopping malls best viewed fromthe freeway, Gehry had won over the post-modernist faithful in 1978 by wrapping hishouse in chain-link fence and, gasp, breakingthe modernist box. By the late Eighties, hewas solidly situated as the pet architect of theLos Angeles elite. Like many in the art world,his clients seemed to love him as much forhis up-by-the-bootstraps life narrative of eth-nic progress as for his often menacing, fre-quently ironic buildings. The catalog for hisfirst retrospective at the Walker Art Center in1986 told how his grandmother had worked as a "foreman" in her father's iron foundry inPoland and, in a tale repeated ad nauseum,kept carp for gefilte fish in the bathtub, infl-uencing Gehry's weirdly obsessive love of fishforms later in life. The main visual innova-tion at Bilbao-the curve-was an extensionof these fish forms.

Yet, from the day the first lucky "insiders"

were spirited over to the construction site toshudder at the majesty of the museum's un-finished skeleton, Gehry and Krens beamedthemselves into a ceaseless feedback loop ofmutual stroking that shows no signs of slow-ing. Before we knew it, Gehry's bag of tricks-the paint-by-numbers box breaking, theharsh unfinished forms, the cute emphasis onthe mass-produced materials of cheap-and-quick construction-had been conjured intoa heretofore unseen "sculptural" and "improv-

isational" style. Suddenly he held "the powerto communicate with everyman." He was


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"the Michael Jordan of bricks and mortar,"yet also somehow the Jackson Pollock, madlycrunching up cut paper to feel out his forms,scribbling incomprehensible expressionisticsketches on airplanes in fits of inspired Amer-

ican individuality and freedom. With its sheathof shimmering titanium that ripples in a strongwind, the Bilbao museum was a perfect sur-face upon which Krens could project his widerglobal ambitions. Gehry was such a goodchoice for the project precisely because he is

par excellence the architect of surface.

54THE BAFFLERFor years, Gehry had been recycling "theelements of a decayed and polarized urbanlandscape ... into a light and airy expressionof a happy lifestyle," as Mike Davis writes inCity of Quartz. But his most anti-urban ges-tures-a 1981 plan to slam a suspension

bridge through the upper floors of the WorldTrade Center comes to mind-derived fromhis shallow sense of the city. Even before he

started working regularly for Disney, a heavythrust in his architecture stressed outsized,eye-catching Disney-scaled set pieces. Helived by the playful ad-world notion that

blasting big images into a city's visual terrainis far-out fantasy, not visual pollution. De-signing a fish restaurant-hey, what abourmaking the building into a giant fish? Anaerospace museum-let's snap a Lockheed F-104 on the fas:ade! Gehry boosters prattle on about the sup-

posed sensitivity to context of the giganticmuseum with the long dinosaur tail at Bil- bao, the intense "sense of place." But the mu-seum only raises the bar on the basic look-at-me theatricality that has always distinguishedGehry's work. Bilbao takes the art of the lureas its prime imperative, disgorging its fantas-tic waves and sheets onto the street. By slap-

ping down a snappy visual image but thentaking the extra step of unraveling it, theedifice could be more than entertainment-itcould be art, even freedom! But, as critic HalFoster wrote in the Los Angeles Times, Gehry's


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"freedom is mostly a franchise in which herepresents freedom more than enacts it." Inother words, this is movie democracy at its

best, gluing us slack-jawed to our seats, asGehry expresses himself by crushing a parade

of gigantic snakes, gigantic severed horseheads, gigantic fish, and gigantic silver rib-

bons on top of our collective heads.Bilbao piques tourists with its curiousmodern ruins. They can browse the funkydecay along the industrially polluted river or

pop in for a snack at the high-priced restau-rant (much was made of the fact that Gehry,who also dabbles in smaller consumer goods,designed the chairs). They wouldn't want tolinger too long inside, though, amid the

pointless scaffolding and fractured sight lines,which alternate with fairly traditional, iflarge, gallery spaces to create an anxiety-in-spiring place. The basic ugliness of the interi-ors, in fact, confirms how little they matter.If the Guggenheim Bilbao, which towers overthe city, is contextual in any sense, if it carriesthe life of its site into its form, it is in an un-nervingly cynical way. For its cataclysmicallystacked, collided, and crumpled forms notonly pun on the nearby smokestacks andcranes; they seem, incredibly, to be Gehry'swhimsical idea of visually rendering the tu-multuous and violent process by which aonce-working industrial waterfront is broughtto heel-an actual enactment of the grim

process that the Guggenheim makes a pointof capitalizing upon.Many in the architecture world these daysconsider it bad form to let something ascoarse and lowbrow as industrial process in-

trude on their hallowed and untouchable sur-faces. A few dutiful rhetorical nods to a"sense of place" are tolerated, but the build-ing of buildings is to convey the breezy graceof symbolic gesture. Gehry's most conspicu-ous triumph at Bilbao was, once and for all,to pull the concerns of architecture back tothe spectacular surface and foster a profes-sion-wide obsession with the "skin" of build-ings. But he also accomplished a second feat,little noted but surely as significant a repudi-

ation of the industrial: By means of digitaltechnology, he dealt a blow to the building


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trades in their long-running turf war with ar-chitects. He accomplished this with his ex-tensive use of CATIA, a computer-assisteddesign program manufactured for the aero-space and automotive industries by Dassault

Systemes and marketed by IBM, which, thanksto the publicity it received at Bilbao, is al-ready changing the way buildings are builtand who builds them.Gehry first used CATIA to design a chain-mesh fish sculpture on top of a 150,000- square-foot mall for the 1992 Olympic villagein Barcelona. But he realized its full potential

Build It and They Will Pay 55at Bilbao. Many critics of CATIA dwell onthe coldness of the concept of digitalized de-sign, but to do so is to miss the most criticalreason the computer made Bilbao possible.As the financial press likes to say, it "reduced capital costs." CATIA allowed Gehry to de-sign complex structural pieces, once modeledand worked out by hand, by simply plugging

a series of coordinates into a computer. Thecomputer then figured out all matters ofstructural stresses once determined by the

building trades, vastly shortening the lengthof time it would otherwise have taken to

build the thing.This is the major benefit of the programfor architects-CATIA is a means ofdes killing the ornery building trades and slic-ing labor hours in favor of the pure visionand billable hours of the architect. The pro-gram ushers in a Tron-like world of numeri-cally controlled laser-cutters, water-jet slicersand routers, multi-axis milling machines,laser-positioning devices, robots, and 3Dmodeling that permits architects to circum-vent the normal rounds of competitive con-struction procurement by predesigning piecesfor preselected vendors who agree to theirterms. For Bilbao, Gehry modeled his de-signs on CATIA in his Santa Monica studio,then transmitted the specs to subcontractorsin Spain who had to go to one of IBM's"CATIA competency centers" to learn how


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to decode and use the program. Thus, whileCATIA reduces labor costs, it also bringsheretofore independent contractors under theaegis of technical know-how controlled by

big multinationals like IBM.

No wonder IBM and Dassault, like Enron,love Frank Gehry. As financial backers of theGuggenheim's Gehry retrospective, the com-

panies released a joint press release filled withfanciful evocations of the master from SantaMonica, and themselves as his helpmate."True artists experience great personal pain intheir undaunted persuit [sic] of excellence,"Ed Petrozelli, general manager, IBM ProductLifecycle Management observed. "Our func-tion, from a technology standpoint, is to in-crease the ability of artists to focus on theirdesigns, and to liberate them to experimentmore freely by removing mechanical con-cerns from the creative process."How those who make their living by suchfusty "mechanical concerns" will fare underthis new rationalization is another matter. Ifthere was any doubt that Taylorist impulseslurked behind Gehry's technophilia, a speechhe made upon receiving the Royal GoldMedal in London in 2000, as reported in The

ArchiteCfs' Journal, made his intentions plain.In his conversations about CAT lA, Gehrytypically sticks to how it liberates his craft.But in this speech, he lost his cool. He pro-claimed that CATIA had given architects thechance to wrestle the title of "master builder"from their enemies in the building trades,and then went on snippishly about how ar-chitects have been "infantilized" by contrac-tors and made "the little woman" of the con-

struction process."The miracle of the computer turns thataround," he said. "There is such a degree ofaccuracy that contractors are not at a greatrisk if they just follow the instructions. Weare working with lawyers and insurers inAmerica to reach a position where the archi-tect becomes the responsible party in theequation. There is a great opportunity for our

profession to become the master builderagain."

Will these Howard Roark fantasies saveGehry from being the bitch of the construc-


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tion industry? It's unclear, but this kind of talkshould dispel any notion that Krens and Gehrysimply provide local jobs and help local gov-ernments turn hard luck of the industrial sort

THE BAFFLERinto a chance for service-sector rebirth. In re-ality, far from salving the wounds inflicted bycapital, the Guggenheim model offers moreof the same. In Bilbao we may observe theethnic Krensing reserved for 21st century ur-

banism.Krens's geocultural strategy is a wonder to

behold, as liquid and mobile and protean ascapital itself After Venice, he went to an oldmanufacturing loft in SoHo; after SoHo toan old lumber mill in Bilbao, after Bilbao toan old bank building in Berlin, after Berlinto a casino in Vegas. Like capital, he has a

palpable "creative" effect. As he exports theAmerican model of culture as lucrative pri-vate deal, he expects governments to wise upand slash their social contracts, opening as aresult more opportunities for privatization or-chestrated by Krens. As he explained to Art

News in 1998:We live in a complex cultural environment. Gov-ernments are wanting to get out of the culturalsupport business. You have more governmentsupport for culture in Europe, but proportion-ately it's coming to the same conclusions as in theU.S.: If you're trying to make a budget balancewith a IO percent or 15 percent unemploymentrate, culture is one of the first things you cut out,

because the constituency for culture tends to berelatively small.Sound familiar? This appeal to sensibleeconomics, hard choices, market austerity,and balanced budgets is remarkably similarto arguments made by Enron and all mannerof other corporate hijackers to redistributemassive public subsidies, asset ownership,and control of whole swaths of the economyinto more profitable private hands. One pos-sible consequence of the Guggenheim's bigmoney tactics, as the director of the WhitneyMuseum of Art in New York City never tiresof pointing out, is that museums' tax-freenonprofit status may be jeopardized over thelong term. That would drag even lofty hold-outs into Krens's shark pit. And what hap-


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pens if the Guggenheim pulls out of a satel-lite museum that is not building up its owncollection and talent to secure its future?What will the Basques have to show for theirmoney then?

The danger in pointing the finger at Krens,of course, is giving a pass to other museumsthat make similarly sly corporate moves-notto mention the raw exploits that gathered thehoards that fund all our philanthropic foun-dations, fellowships, and cultural institutions.What separates Thomas Krens from majorleague sports franchises that extort new stadi-ums from nervous hometowns? He's taking itworldwide. But he's pretty good at the sub-sidy racket at home, too, as is evident in therecent deal for the new Guggenheim NewYork City, which was to be the grand show-case of his and Gehry's brand of new urban-ism. In 2001, amid a crisis in affordable hous-ing, rising homeless ness, poorly funded

parks, gutted social services, arid underpaidteachers instructing crowded classes in crum-

bling schools, New York officials magnani-mously dedicated $700 million for the proj-ect. Gehry returned the favor by phoning ina design that was contemptuous, even by hisstandards. As it happens, the city no longerhas the money, and in any case it's hard toimagine that his clever idea-planting thedestroyed remnant of a skyscraper on top of a

pile of twisted steel-will get off the groundany time soon.It would be nice to think that the Gehry moment will pass. His aestheticization ofdamage, his cynical predilection for replayinga city's trauma on its own landscape, like the

Coney Island rides of yesteryear that chargedimpoverished tenement dwellers to watch thereenactment of a burning tenement-whoneeds it? Sadly, a lot of cities around theworld believe they can't do without it. At lastcount, more than a hundred had put in a bidto get a Guggenheim of their very own.

build it and they will pay

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