On Tuesday, architect Renzo Piano visited Fort Worth to check out the Kimbell Art Museum’s new Piano Pavilion, scheduled to open on November 27. According to KERA News, Piano walked the grounds, tossed a Frisbee with the museum director, and discussed the relationship between the original Louis Kahn building and the new addition. Piano called his Pavilion is an extrovert to Kahn’s introverted Kimbell, adding, “Competing with a masterpiece is stupid. And it’s also wrong. I love that building from Kahn, since the beginning, since it was built.”
This new addition is another extremely visible reason that Austin will find it a difficult road to hoe in getting a museum proper. I would find it very difficult to believe that it has the capacity to compete with Dallas or Houston on any museum front. Remember: After you build it — you have to furnish it with art. Anyone checked Sotheby’s, Christies or Phillips on the cost to acquire? Not a pretty picture. Everything has to compete – and to come out of the blocks this late, with so many failures — seems like a King Sized Nut. Yes, you can take the tack of showing Bleeding Edge Art… but after a while it looks like such a gimmick or hoax that it’s not surprising that there is so little public uptake on helping finance the dream… Sometimes, you just get crowded-out and there’s no recovering from it. Culture can’t be faked or grown overnight in a petri dish — it’s either authentic or Fakeville. It takes time and that is going to cost the ‘Dream Builders‘ money. Lots of money. And Austin has tried the ‘Bleeding Edge/Differentiation Model‘ ad naseum. Didn’t work then and its prospects seem grimmer now.
Back to Fakeville. Rinse. Repeat.
Better to support the Blanton. That’s where the smart money is and has been. The rest, frankly, is just theatre.