Word: museum
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Some exhibitions might have been better as books, and "Berlinart 1961-1987," the Museum of Modern Art's big summer show that closes Sept. 8 in New York City and reopens Oct. 22 in San Francisco, is one. Its senior curator, Kynaston McShine, took on a large subject, perhaps too large. The re-emergence of Berlin as a major center of the visual arts, after twelve years of Nazi darkness and a decade of limping postwar chaos, is not the only story of post- 1960s art, but it stays up there on the front page. Much against the odds...
...cultural life has shifted away from the production of art and ideas to their consumption as fashion. Such an elevation of cultural consumption has profound implications for the meaning of a city as a center of intellectual and artistic life. It threatens to turn the metropolis into a museum of its own culture...
Relics of the past, slowly decaying, can be seen everywhere. Far above the capital stands one of the Shah's palaces, now a sort of museum where schoolchildren gaze in wonder at the cavernous rooms full of crystal and gold. In front of the palace, half of the great bronze statue of the former ruler can still be seen; the monument was severed at the waist during the revolution...
Between them, Dominique de Menil, Hopps and the architect Renzo Piano have got it exactly right: this building, and the thinking behind it, comes as close to the musee imaginaire of one's hopes as one has any right to expect in America today. As a privately funded museum it is free to avoid the cliches of its bigger brethren. No boutiques, no blockbusters, no sense of competition with other museums. No sense of the sealed-off art bunker, either, with overlighted objects caught like startled animals in the glare of spotlights. Above all, none of the grandiosity and architectural...
...experiences. Piano's design eschews the high-tech theatrics that made such a mess of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which he co- designed a decade ago. If ever one building in an architect's career made amends for another, it is this. Imagine something akin to the Frick Museum, but with fewer masterpieces and devoted to the juncture between modernism and the archaic, a place where disinterested aesthetic experience can be enjoyed without coercion or surfeit. One would then have the Menil...