Friday, October 13, 2006
The Denver Art Museum
Daniel Libeskind’s Denver Art Museum carries on a tradition of endgame architecture most in evidence in Gehry's Bilbao; the standard being promoted is that a great revenue attractor is thereby a great edifice. It is not that form is function, it is that there is no function other than attention. The arthouse-as-freak-of-nature mentality, where the ego of the director and architect (and museum board) trumps the works that are supposed to be celebrated inside the structure, and the work of the curators in presenting that work, requires a suspension of common sense, of sophisticated taste, and of a concern for their public charge. With much conceptual art of little interest beyond description, it is easy to understand how the narcissism of administrators could trump the magic of the visual arts in the Denver Art Museum. The achieved motive: a logo to be noticed rather than a house of treasures which is meant to encourage meditation, circumspection, civilization.
From a review in the NYT:
[The Denver Art Museum's] … tortured geometries make it a daunting place to install or view art — hardly a minor drawback. And for all its emotional power, the building seems eerily out of date, and its flaws readily apparent.