The art museum in modern times

Saumarez Smith (former director of the UK's National Portrait Gallery and National Gallery) focuses narrowly on museum leadership's effect on current institutions but does not address the nuances of museum evolution. He provides case studies of his favorite museums, organized in uninspired chronological order, and uses MoMA (NYC) as the standard against which he compares others. Saumarez Smith nods at how the architecture of "modern" structures is often part of the collection, but ignores such other important art historical studies of the spaces of museums as Rosalind Krauss's The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum (1990), Hal Foster's The Art-Architecture Complex (2011), and Claire Bishop's Radical Museology (2013). Though a few museums in other locations are included, the author has an obvious American and Western European bias and maintains the older, whiter favoritism of lazy art history. A treatment of the interactions between institutions or a closer look at the changed expectations of visitors over time would have benefited the work and the reader. He closes by leaving it to the next generation of "architects, trustees, and museum directors" (leaving out many critical museum roles). Overall: this topic deserves better. Summing Up: Optional. Researchers, professionals. --Katherine E. Staab, Kaiser Permanente

Former National Portrait Gallery director Smith examines how museums' architecture and design has elevated the experience of art in this perceptive and generously illustrated volume. Beginning with New York's Museum of Modern Art, Smith takes a sweeping inventory of contemporary museums worldwide, revealing how funding, leadership, vision, and architecture have transformed the institutions' meaning and purpose, rendering these spaces "as much about the geography of contemporary cultural and artistic experience as about the history of the art and culture of the past." With detailed case studies of venues including London's Victoria and Albert Museum, which salute more scholarly works, and New York's MoMA, which demonstrates the "experience of modernity," Smith considers how museums have changed over the past 80 years and now focus less on the canon than on evolving displays, stimulating viewing experiences, and striking architecture. He further elucidates his points with mini-histories of playful postmodern institutions interested in taking visitors on a "personal, private journey," among them Frank Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, with its transfixing, "free-form design," and the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, a cavernous structure where art-seeing becomes a "visceral and sensual experience." Insightful and thought provoking, this work is required reading for cultural historians, art connoisseurs, and museumgoers. (Apr.)

Former National Portrait Gallery director Smith examines how museums' architecture and design has elevated the experience of art in this perceptive and generously illustrated volume. Beginning with New York's Museum of Modern Art, Smith takes a sweeping inventory of contemporary museums worldwide, revealing how funding, leadership, vision, and architecture have transformed the institutions' meaning and purpose, rendering these spaces "as much about the geography of contemporary cultural and artistic experience as about the history of the art and culture of the past." With detailed case studies of venues including London's Victoria and Albert Museum, which salute more scholarly works, and New York's MoMA, which demonstrates the "experience of modernity," Smith considers how museums have changed over the past 80 years and now focus less on the canon than on evolving displays, stimulating viewing experiences, and striking architecture. He further elucidates his points with mini-histories of playful postmodern institutions interested in taking visitors on a "personal, private journey," among them Frank Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, with its transfixing, "free-form design," and the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, a cavernous structure where art-seeing becomes a "visceral and sensual experience." Insightful and thought provoking, this work is required reading for cultural historians, art connoisseurs, and museumgoers. (Apr.)