Word: museume
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Luxembourg's Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean has almost everything a modern art museum could want: a prime location overlooking the nation's capital, a dramatic new building designed by renowned architect I.M. Pei and an expected deluge of art-hungry visitors. Luxembourg is one of this year's European Capitals of Culture, and a new TGV fast-train line from France opens in June...
...chosen as the architect nearly a decade before the matter was settled, and he has produced a temple of culture even a banker could love. Sitting on a plain high above the rest of Luxembourg City, the museum is laid out like an arrowhead, echoing the old, arrow-shaped Thüngen Fortress next door (soon to be a museum itself). Mudam's exterior is sheathed in French "Louvre" limestone that radiates the honeyed glow of its Parisian namesake. The interior - bright, airy and playful - is well-suited to the occasional zaniness of the art on display. Even the museum...
...Just one thing is missing from the museum: modern art. Since its opening last July, the place has seemed oddly empty. Unlike its more established peers - Paris' Pompidou Center, Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, New York City's Museum of Modern Art - the Grand-Duc Jean (named after the sovereign who retired in 2000) doesn't have much of a permanent collection. Planners behind Mudam, as the Musée d'Art Moderne is known for short, started buying works about a decade ago. Even then, Monets and Manets were beyond their budget, and a Picasso was out of the question...
...That could almost describe the museum. Mudam has been in the works for nearly two decades, slowed by squabbling among city fathers over its site, design, materials and even whether Luxembourg - a hardheaded realm of financiers and Eurocrats - needed such an extravagance. Jacques Santer, the country's former Prime Minister and a European Commission President, helped convince them to seek repute as a cultural capital instead of a mere tax haven...
...Historically, Japan is a country of design," says fashion innovator Issey Miyake, who plans to open 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT, Japan's first museum dedicated to the subject, on March 30 in Tokyo's megacomplex, Tokyo Midtown, in Roppongi. "Everything is design, from the things people take pleasure in, from gardens, scrolls, paintings and Kabuki, to the things people use." With a name that gestures to a realm of design beyond the limits of 20/20 vision, 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT is a Tadao Ando--designed building that was conceived as a forum where people could think about design. Together with...