ART

In 'Museum, Inc.,' an insider's look at business of art
Paul Werner draws from his Guggenheim years to explore the industry's corporatization.

By Carlin Romano



Museum, Inc.Inside the Global Art WorldBy Paul Werner
Prickly Paradigm Press. 115 pp. $10

Forgive me if I laugh.

Museum, Inc. falls into a caustic tradition of books that bemoan the corporatization of American institutions once admired (accurately or not) for caring about things other than money. Some of them boast comparable titles. There's a University, Inc., for instance, and if some downsized journalist isn't working on Newspaper, Inc., blame the demands of freelancing for getting in the way of reporting the Zeitgeist in one's own profession.
The difference with Museum, Inc. by Paul Werner, ex-lecturer at New York's Guggenheim Museum and editor of the visual arts journal WOID, is that this little screed is relentlessly brilliant, hilarious, dead-on and hyperwitty. Werner writes like Vanity Fair critic James Wolcott on speed (while channeling philosopher of art Arthur Danto), and since the Vanity Fair critic produces more metaphors stone sober than the New York Times manages in a month, this makes for a wild ride.
Werner unpacks his polemic as if it's a war dance conducted around his former boss, Tom Krens. The iconoclastic director of the Guggenheim since the early '90s, Krens is the man who took the Guggenheim native and raised its number of visitors from 350,000 to three million between 1989 and 2001. To Werner, Krens "had a common fault of the academic half-baked: he imagined he was thinking outside the box simply because the box in which he thought was the latest in boxes."
Werner explains: "The role of the American art museum is to launder the money of its trustees and sponsors, not, as you may think, by turning one asset ('cocaine,' for instance) into another asset (say, 'Rembrandts'), but by turning artworks into objects of authority and trust - objects that mediate and are mediated by the worth of money. The American art museum turns art into buzz the way its owners turn pork bellies into pork-belly futures."
Krens did that, too, Werner argues, but in an over-the-top, pseudo-populist mode that resembles globalizing the McDonald's brand more than bringing masses to culture. (Think Guggenheim Bilbao, as well as the failed Guggenheim Rio de Janeiro). Krens, he writes, "had a brain like tofu: it absorbed the taste of others without having any taste of its own. To the stodgy conservatives of art the Guggenheim was the equivalent of Clintonian Neo-liberalism and Krens its Bubba."
Nonetheless, despite exhibitions of motorcycles, or smearings of Vaseline on walls, the Guggenheim by Werner's lights "followed the same operating principles" as what he calls the "American Museum Establishment": "authority to define what was to be consumed or circulated; encouragement of consumption for consumption's sake; and a deep and abiding interest in dissimulating class distinctions."
"Krens was steering the Mother Ship where no museum had ever gone before," Werner gibes, "authority regardless of content." The Guggenheim's "stated mission was no longer making art available to an audience, it was delivering 'its' audience to a new sponsor."
Werner, however, extrapolates way beyond Krens in Museum, Inc. to all sorts of searing insights about today's big-time art world, its unholy mixture of funny money, fake egalitarianism, and backroom investment schemes. Book reviewers consider some books "cursive torments" - too much underlining! Make sure your pen is working with this one.
Catalogs "are what shrinks might call a transitional snobject: they're tokens, a paper T-shirt, a rich man's Been There, Done That." Many of them are "written in Kraussian [after the art critic Rosalind Krauss], a language related to Fustian... whose main purpose is not to provide information or foster debate but to protect the speaker from accountability." Philip Johnson ranked as "the Dr. Strangelove of architecture."
Tucked in with all the rhetorical acrobatics, however, is a canny, erudite analysis of the high-art market from the Enlightenment to now.
Some culture critics win praise for boldly admitting no sacred cows. Werner's way beyond that - he's so full of beans (polite phrase for newspaper purposes) it would be unsafe to leave him alone in a room with a sacred cow. If you liked Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word, with its full-frontal photos of the art world's naked emperors, imagine it with a shot of Guy Debord, a twist of Walter Benjamin. Enjoy the jolt.