What, when and how to build a culturally relevant structure has been the great debate for many years. It possibly hit its high point with the construction of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao launching the great Bilbao effect theories. With a global recession slowing development plans and foundations cutting back on capital funding a debate is forming on the future of newly built cultural institutions.
In Spain the country is struggling to reconcile it’s cultural infrastructure building boom of the 1980s with the evolving role of the creative community and their needs.
“Spain has rushed to create a cultural infrastructure which previously did not exist,” says Martinez. “In many cases it was carried out without planning, giving priority to the container, not the content, and now we do not know what to do with all these buildings. The current situation simply demonstrates the result of the politics of waste and showbusiness.”
Borja-Villel remains optimistic. “Smaller institutions need to find their own identity,” he says. He sees the development of a sense of real communality as a solution. “The question is how to use these spaces in a different way. We cannot be alone any more, we are living through a change in history, and must not be afraid to make mistakes.” Better questions and better mistakes would seem to be the answer.
While in the United States historically unique cultural institutions are giving way to corporate boards and uniform musuems and buildings. Does this reflect a larger cultural shift?
” The three museums’ iconoclastic collectors, and the institutions they built, embodied an America that still embraced an ideal of stubborn individualism. That spirit is now mostly gone, a victim of institutional conventions and corporate boards, and by a desire for mainstream acceptance that has displaced a willingness to break rules.
[...] What the museums all had, however, was an eagerness to challenge convention. Albert C. Barnes and J. Paul Getty saw themselves as cultural outsiders. Both saw their museums as ways to thumb their noses at cultural insiders — Barnes at Philadelphia’s insular community of art patrons, Getty at what he called the “doctrinaire and elitist views” of the art world.”
