"In many respects, the past few years have been very good years for art museums around the world. I doubt that they have ever been more popular. In the US alone last year, for example, more than 10 million people visited the Metropolitan Museum and the National Gallery, Washington, while more than 800,000 people saw a single exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. With all this excitement, more and more museums are getting bigger and bigger. New York's Museum of Modern Art is set to more than double its size, and new museum buildings are being planned or are underway everywhere from San Francisco to Bilbao to Berlin. With all this success and excitement, what is to worry about the state of our museums? All too often such success has encouraged wreckless behavior which has made art museums seem like greedy institutions hellbent on getting richer and richer, and larger and larger for no other purpose than for being so. Why should art museums always be so big, so sensational?"
(James Cuno)
discursive museum