Analyzing Krens: The Tofu-Brained Monster

• Krens had borrowed Clinton's rosy-cheeked trappings all right: the utopianism, the surface populism, and most of all the innocent faith that all of the barriers of class had come down like so many Berlin Walls of culture, That an Invisible Hand had erased all distinctions in the art world as it erased them in all realms, everywhere.... Invisible Hand, my foot.

• All he had to do was apply the principles of free-market capitalism to the museum as a whole and the pesky little details would take care of themselves.

• Krens could only visulaize cyberspace as a container for art; he had the same conception of the real space of the Guggenheim. In his view Wright's architecture didn't even do for art what the skin does for the body, it was more like the cheap plastic jewel case for a CD: no dynamic interaction between container and context... To Krens, the Guggenheim building was like a box of corn-flakes: container, plus decoration.

• "The function of a musem is to create a situation in which viewers do not feel they are tyrannized," Krens explained to his Naphta-kissing pals up on the Magic Mountain, with a telling turn to the double negative.

• Krens didn't really address Wright's architecture, but merely dusted it with sparkles. And the decor was as decorative as the art: the greenery and flash, the sense of "being in the right place" were the only justifications for coming.

• The catalog was the second level in the Great Pyramid of Krens; it was just another joker in his house of cards... They're objects of pride, of pride in being bright, and they guaranteed an income as surely as a Wright or Ghery building guaranteed a "gate," a minimum cash flow no matter what was showing. And because catalogs sold regardless of content there was little interest in catalog content... The Guggenheim's catalogs were more likely to contain criticism and essays than empirical data.

• Krens seemed to be gambling on a collateral he blew out of his tears like a junk-bond gambler, but the return on his investment -- the justification for the gamble -- was made out to be the spontaneous appearance of hordes of visitors through the galleries.

• Krens imagined that circulating new objects (bikes or blouses) through auratic channels (museums) would automatically confer an aura on them and authority on the museum.

• He had a habit of leaving his hog by the staff entrance, perhaps to console the rest of us for not owning a BMW or more likely out of his usual, sublime indifference.

• His critics were wrong to claim Krens was trying to commodify culture: he was trying to culturificate commodities, and he failed.

• "I am not interested in being just an elitist institution that des not speak to a broad cross-section of the population," Krens claimed... Krens bragged that the number of visitors had gone from 350,000 a year to 3 million between 1989 and 2001, but it wasn't clear where attendance had risen, and for what shows, and what the investment had been for each... Besides, if admissions really covered expenses what would be the point of donors and trustees and sponsors?

• As Kimmelman pointed out, Krens was too much concerned with the bottom line. He had to be: he never had the wiggle room of a traditional museum director. There were financial gains and losses and then there were other gains, of the cultural kind, not easily banked and not easily used to offset financial losses... Krens was offering his expertise, the expertise of his staff, of his pet architect, his curators and [Werner] to whatever government, power group or corporation might think to benefit. This went beyond what museums had been doing for centuries.

• What Kimmelman denounced as "commercialism" was so mush wishful thinking, as if putting on a show of religious art made you a high-payed lobbyist at the Vatican. Krens was steering the Mother Ship where no museums had ever gone before: authority regardless of content. But if the only meaning you got from your visit was the authority of free-market capitalism then you might as well go to the mall.

• Museums were the engines of a new economy, and Krens, Ghery, and Koolhaas the acknowledged legislators of the world.

• Krens was trying to transmutate symbolic capital into financial capital and back again as if it were the easiest thing in the world to shift assets form one column to another.

• "Democracy" is okay to the extent that it divides people into spectators and participants. Krens got stuck somewhere in between... "People say that the distinctions between fields are shrinking," he insisted. That shrinking was not apparent in the day to day operations of the Guggenheim, or of any other museum.

• When Krens insists that "the function of a museum is to create a situation in which viewers do not feel they tyrannized" one has to wonder if he means tyrannized by the content of the museum, or its staff.

• Krens claimed democracy consisted in not forcing people to plunk down fifteen bucks to see something they never wanted to see anyhow, but now, after 9/11, that's not his problem any more. His problem now is bringing them in.

• From the outset Krens just wanted them to keep on coming; he wanted the twin balance sheets "fashionable" and "finance" to match up. He wasn't particularly interested in controlling what they saw, or even how they saw it, and the same archaic relations of production have now returned to bite him, bite us all, in the butt.

• Krens, too, got caught up in the spiraling cost of getting people interested in something they just aren't that interested in... When Peter Lewis, the Guggenheim's chairman, grew concerned, Krens fired him for gross fiscal competence with the help of a Board packed of real-estate especulators. The New York Times calls this a victory over money, which it is: a triumph of the belief that art makes money over the certainty that money makes art.

• Krens believed in the green. He also believed in the art. Problem is, he believed in them both in the same fashion... K's vision of the museum was something like a DNA strand: two parallel systems, one based on the belief that art would improve us, the other based on the belief that money would; built, actually, on a slipshod model of capital, symbolic capital, and their relation.