The City in an Art Museum

Paddling Home, Kacey Wong, 2010

It’s not often that you get a chance to build a museum from scratch, but that is exactly what’s happening in Hong Kong, where a long-awaited museum of contemporary art and visual culture will soon take shape.

The 40,000-square-metre museum, known as M+ — short for Museum Plus — will be the centrepiece of the West Kowloon Cultural District, an ambitious US$3-billion project whose birth has been nothing if not troubled. After struggling for years to settle on a master development plan that pleased the public, the district lost its chief executive when British cultural administrator Graham Sheffield abruptly stepped down last winter. He blamed the resignation on ill health, but two months later, he landed a plum new job as Director Arts of the British Council. The attitude of the Hong Kong arts community towards the district can be charitably described as cynical.

Amidst all of this controversy, however, M+ seems like a beacon of hope, if only because of the talent involved in its development. The museum’s director, Swedish museologist Lars Nittve, led the creation of the Tate Modern in London. Lead curator Tobias Berger, originally from Germany, shook up the Hong Kong art scene when he became curator of the city’s premier alternative art space, Para/Site, in 2005. Later, he left for Seoul, where he worked as curator at the Nam June Paik Art Center.

Nittve and Berger’s ambitions for M+ are not modest. “Every epoch and almost every place has its museum,” says Nittve. “Asia is still waiting for a museum that reflects its time and place.” His goal, he says, is to create a museum that does for Hong Kong what MOMA did for New York in the 1940s and 50s, by placing it at the very centre of the cultural zeitgeist. “It totally rethought how you work with collections, how you work with exhibitions,” says Nittve. “People had never seen anything like it before. It was super radical. And it reflected a turning of the tables in the global balance.”

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In Defence of Street Art

Ai Wei Wei projection graffiti, Hong Kong. Photo by Cpak Ming

This month, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles opened a new exhibition on the history of street art and graffiti, the first such show at a major American museum. It has been greeted by controversy. One of the curators has been accused of having a commercial conflict of interest and street artists have accused the museum of censoring one of the graffiti murals it commissioned.

The exhibition has also suffered from broad-based attacks on its very subject matter. Last week, City Journal published a lengthy attack by Manhattan Institute fellow Heather MacDonald, whose argument against the show can be summarized as follows: graffiti is a cancer that destroys cities, yet it has been embraced by hypocritical cultural elites who rarely suffer the consequence of is damage. She seems utterly offended that a major art museum would consider mounting a show dedicated to vandalism.

Leaving aside a minute the fact that the Manhattan Institute is a think tank that promotes “greater economic choice and individual responsibility” — a euphemism for the neo-liberal policies that have dismantled social programs and financial regulations and ushered in an era of economic instability and a growing wealth gap — MacDonald’s piece is worth considering because it makes use of so many of the most common arguments against street art. To start, she trots out that tired old workhorse, the broken-windows theory, which suggests that any instance of neglect or disrepair in an urban neighbourhood will lead to higher crime rates and a breakdown of social order. MacDonald uses it to illustrate graffiti’s effect on cities:

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Two Cities’ Scale Models

Set in the seclusion of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, well inside the largest of New York’s outer boroughs, the Queens Museum of Art doesn’t attract the same blockbuster number of international visitors as the megamuseums and power galleries of Manhattan. That hardly means it fails to draw from cosmopolitan sources — in a borough as diverse as Queens, appealing to the local population means displaying art that speaks to many points of origin. But the museum is best known for a work of very local significance: the Panorama of the City of New York, a vast scale model of the five boroughs built on Robert Moses’ orders for the 1964 World’s Fair.

Despite an occasional lack of updates — including one twenty-some year gap — the Panorama has been kept fairly timely. Though the last comprehensive upgrade took place in 1992, sponsors can now adopt buildings and ensure the accuracy of a given plot on the map. There are some exceptions where updates are off limits; the museum preferred the World Trade Center towers remain standing rather than represent Ground Zero (they will be replaced when the new site’s new towers are completed). But by and large, the model is a decent representation of the city — precise enough to use for mapping geodata.

Last year, urban planner and artist Damon Rich did just that, taking advantage of the Panorama to detail the extent of home foreclosures in New York. Reasoning that, for many New Yorkers, the foreclosure crisis appeared to be something taking place in far-flung Sunbelt suburbs, his aim was to bring the extent of the national real estate debacle home to a city that didn’t yet seem to realize the problem had reached its front stoop.

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History in a Chair

It’s 1905 in one of Shau Tau Kok’s small Hakka villages. A young couple has just been married. Now, the bride, wearing a veil, is being carried away to her new family-in-law’s house in an elaborately-carved wooden sedan chair—co kiau in Hakka—that been draped in a red sash to keep out evil spirits. Firecrackers greet her when she arrives, the insistence of their explosions signalling the start of a week-long celebration of the union of two families.

The beautiful Hakka sedan chair you see below, now housed in the Hong Kong Heritage Museum’s New Territories Heritage Hall, is over a century old but it still evokes the bittersweet feelings a young woman must have experienced on the day of her wedding, a mix of exhilaration and trepidation. It’s almost a shame that it is kept behind a plastic shield — we’ll never get to know what it feels like to sit inside.

A Century of Subway Cars

Elegant wood-panelled New York subway car with wicker seats from the turn of the twentieth century.

The New York Transit Museum is a paradise for public transportation obsessives. The museum has a chronological collection of turnstiles and subway tokens on display, with detailed descriptions of the minutest changes over the years. This may be a bit much for the average visitor, but everyone gets a kick out of wandering through the old subway trains downstairs, which contain period ads and the original transit maps.

A streamlined subway car from the 1950s…


… and the subways on the tracks today.

The Romance of Detroit, Institutionalised

The most salient feature of the ruin’s enchantment, as Walter Benjamin would put it, is “aura,” the distance one feels temporally from art. The Acropolis, the Pyramids, the temples of pre-Mughal India — all these embodied some mythic conception of the past and its tragic downfall. In other words, the romance of the ruin was enabled by passing time; in an earlier age, the ruin would have been viewed for what it was, mere structural decay. Perhaps a portion of an aqueduct would be used to channel water somewhere, or a temple wall dismantled for new homes, but otherwise, the use-value of such crumbling structures was denigrated, and with it their worth. So it was until enough time had passed and a bard like Byron or Shelley sung (for whatever purpose) the long lost virtues of the time that had produced the forerunner of ruin.

Detroit is not yet of age. Its factories, stores, churches and homes have lain fallow a mere four decades while suburban Michigan prospers and progresses with precision linearity into cornfield after cornfield to escape the blight of urban detritus that a nomadic population, on the run from the past, has left behind. Put another way, Detroit’s ruins are still seen by many as the failure of use-value; its forlorn, forgotten ironworks and auto assembly plants not objets d’art but underutilised machinery. Its abandoned parks and graffiti strewn alleys are not the touristic fantasia that animates that paragon of ruin, Pompeii, but reminders of an insurmountable failure. Detroit has not yet commoditised its failure; it merely wallows in it.

It is at this moment that Andrew Zago has unveiled his new Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the embodiment of Detroit-as-Pompeii, the romanticisation of its still-ostensible wounds.

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Revolutionary to Some, A Tool Shed to Others

In Kansas City, Missouri hath dwelt a project that portends a riotous, semi-calamitous melieu of consternation for the benefactors, the commoners, and even the neer-do-wells. Here is the Nelson Atkins Museum of Fine Art in its known form:

Then, one day, the powers that be decided there simply wasn’t enough room for all of the art on hand, and thence architect of prominence Steven Holl was commissioned to design an expansion. You’ll either love it or hate it. Tool sheds and Butler Buildings… or revolutionary architecture.

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