If you build it they might not come

“As early as 1996, Nicholas Serota framed ‘the dilemma of museums of modern art’ as a stark option, ‘experience or interpretation’, which might be rephrased as entertainment on the one side and aesthetic contemplation and/or historical understanding on the other. Nearly twenty years later, however, we needn’t be stymied by this either/or. Spectacle is here to stay, at least as long as capitalism is, and museums are part of it; that’s a given, but for that very reason it shouldn’t be a goal.”

In The London Review of Books Hal Foster looks at the new art museums  and wonders what the hell are they trying to do? Image: Rome’s Maxxi by Zaha Hadid