I often think of the day when the Guggenheim will finally close down for dearth of exhibition ideas or because fashion magnate Hugo Boss had decided to shift or discontinue corporate support. then, without the cultural clutter of “Africa” and “abstraction” or “mediascape” and “Koons,” the Guggenheim could remain open as an architectural monument without exhibitions (as its architect probably envisioned it anyway). it could become one of the truly great twentieth-century testimonies to the failed idea of the museum as a site of democratic civility and of the bourgeois public sphere, where a class constructed and preserved its own visuality and cultural self-consciousness, outside corporate state power and state corporations.
benjamin buchloh