MCLC: museum boom

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: museum boom
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (3/20/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/arts/artsspecial/a-prosperous-china-goes-
on-a-museum-building-spree.html

A Building Boom in China
By HOLLAND COTTER 

After years of fevered activity, museum building and expansion in the
United States have slowed to a crawl under a low-lying economic cloud. In
Europe, where the climate is even stormier, venerable state-financed
institutions go begging for cash.

In China, by contrast, the fiscal sun shines.

Museums — big, small, government-backed, privately bankrolled — are
opening like mad. In 2011 alone, some 390 new ones appeared. And the
numbers are holding. China is opening museums on a surreal scale.

Many are multipurpose affairs, mixing history, ethnography, science,
politics, art and entertainment. The museum devoted only to art is a
relatively novel concept in China. Models for it, most of them Western,
are still being sorted out, though they tend to line up at either end of
the temporal spectrum, focusing on the very new or the very old.

Until recently, museums of contemporary art in China had been privately
run, either as corporate entities or as the vanity showcases of rich
collectors. Last October, an important precedent was set with the opening
of the Shanghai Contemporary Art Museum, the country’s first
government-supported museum of up-to-the-minute work.

If official acknowledgment of the importance of Chinese art’s
international stature was long delayed, it was fairly bold when it
arrived. The Shanghai museum, popularly known as the Power Station of Art
<http://www.powerstationofart.org/en/> — it’s in a converted 19th-century
power plant — is physically spectacular. It opened with a major globalist
bang in the form of the 9th Shanghai Biennale
<http://www.shanghaibiennale.org/en/>, which filled the capacious interior
and spread out into the surrounding city.

The Biennale still has a little time to run; it closes March 31.
Meanwhile, some 1,600 miles west of Shanghai, at the oasis city of
Dunhuang on the edge of the Gobi Desert, another museum, or something like
a museum, far less conventional than the Power Station, is under
construction. Its purpose is not to attract crowds to new art, but to keep
them away from damaging contact with old art, specifically the ancient and
rapidly deteriorating Buddhist murals that cover the interiors of hundreds
of caves in the Dunhuang area.

Painted between the fourth and 14th centuries at a central point on the
Silk Road, the caves constitute a virtual museum of cosmopolitan Chinese
culture spanning a millennium.

As different as they are, the Shanghai and Dunhuang museums share one
quality typical of China’s new cultural institutions: ambitiousness. Often
this is simply measured in size.

When the revamped National Museum of China opened in Beijing in 2011, much
was made, officially, of its being, square foot for square foot, the
single largest museum of any kind in the world, even though the history of
China it told was strategically truncated.

The taste for gigantism was evident again in Shanghai last fall. On the
same October day that the Power Station opened, so did a second state
museum in Shanghai, the China Art Museum, sometimes called the China Art
Palace <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/arts/11iht-rartshanghai11.html>.
Dedicated largely to 20th-century Chinese modernism, and housed in a zany
lacquer-red structure originally erected for the 2010 World Expo, it
advertised itself as the biggest museum of new art in the country. So it
is, though anyone could see that its exhausting display would benefit from
serious editing.

But Shanghai’s two state museums are only the tip of the city’s new-art
iceberg, with smaller institutions making up in sheer numbers what they
lack in size. Most of the smaller museums are privately owned and
financed. At least two, the Minsheng Art Museum
<http://www.minshengart.com/en/about_01.html> and the Rockbund Art Museum
<http://www.rockbundartmuseum.org/en/en_newsList.asp>, have solid
reputations.

The Minsheng, supported by a banking corporation, specializes in
contemporary Chinese art. Under its deputy director, Zhou Tiehai
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/arts/29iht-rartzhou.html>, himself a
well-known artist (his satirical “Joe Camel” paintings made the
international rounds a decade or so ago), the museum has organized
valuable retrospectives for midcareer artists who have been influential in
China without being well known abroad.

The Rockbund, which opened in 2010, operates as a kind of kunsthalle, with
rotating shows and no collection. It is notable for highlighting
non-Chinese art, a trend that has spread to larger museums. When the China
Art Palace opened it featured a special show
<http://www.artmuseumonline.org/enevent/2069.jhtml>, “Congratulations From
the World,” of premier odds-and-ends loans from the British Museum, the
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Power
Station recently played host to Surrealist surveys
<http://www.powerstationofart.org/en/exhibition/overview/db8js.html> from
the Pompidou Center in Paris.

An international mix is the rule in the proliferating number of vanity
museums created by private collectors.
Late last year, Liu Yiqian, a billionaire Shanghai investor, and his wife,
Wang Wei, opened their Dragon Museum (also known as the Long Museum), with
holdings that included ancient bronzes, Mao-era paintings and contemporary
works. The couple’s attention is now focused exclusively on the new and,
being ardent shoppers, they have plans for a second museum in the city.

That will be joined by yet another museum, to hold the collection of Budi
Tek, a Chinese-Indonesian entrepreneur who in 2011 made the Art & Auction
list <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/arts/16iht-rartjessop16.html> of
the 10 most powerful figures in the international art world. At the time
he had been buying for a scant six years but had already established a
museum in Jakarta. Now, thanks to a Chinese government deal, he has at his
disposal a building, an old airplane hangar, ready to be renovated and
expanded for a museum in Shanghai.

Given the current trophy value of new art in China, and the fact that the
country has, according to Forbes, the world’s second-highest number of
billionaires, the prospect of further private museums seems endless. How
those museums will shape up, though, is a question. Building walls is one
thing; gathering significant work is another.

Many private collections now are simply products of what the global market
pushes: the same three hot Chinese artists, hot European artists, and so
on. But while museums for such collections proliferate, China still has no
museum offering anything like a comprehensive historical view of the
country’s contemporary art over the last 30 years. And features that are
taken for granted in museums elsewhere — scholarship, educational
outreach, overarching curatorial perspectives — are absent or in a nascent
stage in many of China’s institutions of new art.

Without knowledgeable administrative oversight, what is to prevent future
state-sponsored museums of new art — and surely there will be more — from
mindlessly going the bigger-is-better route? What is to prevent private
museums from being glorified storage facilities — places for collectors to
park art, with no higher purpose than to flaunt personal power through
material accumulation?

Higher purpose is precisely what the Dunhuang project has going for it. Or
maybe higher purposes: to preserve the past, but also, symbolically, to
right past wrongs.

Buddhist caves are found in several sites around Dunhuang, but a large
majority, some 700, are carved into long cliffs at a place called Mogao
several miles outside the city. According to legend, in the fourth century
a wandering monk was drawn to Mogao by a vision of flashing lights.
Believing the place holy, he scooped out a cave from the cliff and stayed.

Other monks came. More caves were excavated as temples and meditation
halls, and their walls covered with paintings. Stucco sculptures of the
Buddha, some very large, were created and painted to produce total
decorative environments. The site became a magnet for pilgrimages, and a
major center of learning with a vast library of handwritten manuscripts
gathered from imperial China to the east, and India and beyond to the west.

In the 14th century, as trade shifted from land to sea routes, traffic
dropped off; the number of monks diminished. At some point, a library of
some 50,000 manuscripts was sealed up in a single cave for safety. Mogao’s
existence was forgotten. In the late 19th century, it was rediscovered,
and starting in 1900 a succession of explorers — from Europe, Russia,
Japan, the United States — arrived on the scene. They chipped paintings
off walls and sent them home. They found the sealed library, divided it up
and shipped most of it out. The Qing dynasty did nothing to prevent any of
this.

It was only long after that, in the 1940s, that China fully reclaimed the
caves and began restoring them. Over time, their mystique grew. In 1979,
the year they were opened to the public, 20,000 visitors came. By the late
2000s, the annual count had soared to 800,000. By this time, the threat of
damage to the paintings, through exposure to human-generated humidity and
carbon dioxide, had become severe. Today, almost all the caves are closed.

To preserve Mogao as both a work of art and a tourist goal, archaeologists
in charge of the site submitted a proposal to the Chinese government for a
visitor center that would let people experience the caves with minimal
access. The plan was approved. The visitor center
<http://www.friendsofdunhuang.org/visitor-center.php?lang=en>, designed by
the Beijing architect Cui Kai as a group of futuristic, dunelike domes,
will open this year.

The operation will be carefully regulated. Visitors will come to the
center, be shown a short film on the Silk Road history of Dunhuang, and
then see immersive digital projections of several of the most elaborate
cave interiors. They will then go a few miles by bus to Mogao, where they
will see several real caves and spend time in a museum of Mogao artifacts
— portable sculptures, textiles, handwritten scrolls — before returning to
the center.

A selection 
<http://www.chinainstitute.org/gallery/exhibitions/upcoming-exhibitions/>
of such objects will be at the China Institute Gallery in Manhattan
beginning April 19 to kick off “The Year of Dunhuang,” a series of events
geared to attracting Western attention, and dollars. Of the $52 million
that the center will cost, $33 million is from the Chinese government; the
rest must be raised independently.

This project is by no means the only example of digitally assisted
conservation in China. A similar one was documented in a show called
“Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan,
<http://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/exhibitions/echoes-of-the-past/>” which
was organized by the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago in 2010. But Dunhuang
holds a special place in China’s cultural imagination. To care for it is
to make amends for past neglect. Perhaps most important, to see the art of
those caves in place at the desert’s edge is a deep experience.

Will that experience be as intense with some digital intervention? And if
so, how much is acceptable? As in matters of contemporary culture, China
is asking questions, about both the nature of art and the function of
museums, that we rarely consider. But with money for our own cultural
institutions hard to come by; with billionaire vanity museums on the rise
here too; and with a 21st-century museum audience addicted to seeing art
through cellphone screens, China’s long museological learning curve has
much to teach us.