Paul Werner
Museum, Inc.:
Inside the Global Art World.
Prickly Paradigm Press, 76 pages, $10.
Books, books, everywhere, and not a word to read. So
will go the epitaph of print
media.
Prickly Paradigm Press, distributed by the University
of Chicago Press, is one imprint, however, that intends to survive
the mega-publisher dirge. Christened in 1993 in Cambridge
under the name Prickly Pear, this small
press endeavored to revive the culture of the pamphleteer. Matthew
Engelke, who became Pear’s co-editor in 1998, now oversees a catalogue of
twenty-two titles. All are uniformly designed
(soft cover, unattractive), opinionated
(contrarian, often critical of the author’s own field), and
mercifully to-the-point (many well under 100 pages).
Whether all of the “paradigms” are worthwhile is something else. I am still
wrestling with two of the titles: Paradigm 13 by
James Elkins (What Happened to Art Criticism?) and
Paradigm 15 by Lindsay Waters (Enemies of Promise: Publishing,
Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship).
Paradigm 8 by Donna
Haraway (The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and
Significant Otherness) I’m planning to do
without—apologies to Fido.
One of the latest “Paradigms,” number 21 for those keeping
score, has come by way of an ex-employee of the Guggenheim Museum and
its infamous director. The name of Thomas Krens will not
be unfamiliar to readers of this magazine. As the museum
director of the 1990s, Krens franchised the Guggenheim brand to the
highest international bidder and converted Frank Lloyd
Wright’s spiral jetty into a showroom for motorcycles,
Armani clothes—whoever was willing to pay to play. In doing so he
sent a shudder down the spine of anyone who regarded a museum as a
safe house for culture and not an enterprise to be
monetized and leveraged and gambled away.
In Museum, Inc., Paul Werner takes us back to the go-go Nineties
when Krens was the dot-com-age entrepreneur who had
the museum world up in
arms. Werner describes the “verbal gunfights in which Philippe de
Montebello, tradition-bound Director of the Metropolitan Museum
of Art and unofficial spokesperson for the League of Disgruntled
Directors, met Krens at high noon.”
Werner’s book is rich in metaphor and unfortunately even richer in
rant. As a Guggenheim insider, Werner has been presented with a
golden journalistic opportunity, but he squanders his chance by
mistaking hot air ramblings for old-fashioned
story-telling—Krensian fluff, if you will, for the genuine
article. Rather than a history of the Guggenheim Museum, we get a
crash course in symbolic capital, exchange value, and other
Marxist slogans. In place of a Krens backstory, we learn about the
“Apologist for the Depraved Playthings of Tyranny and Their
Sniveling Lackeys.” Instead of an eye-witness account, we read,
“As the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu suggested … As Walter
Benjamin put it … As Guy Debord put it … ”
These narrative tics may suffice at Speakers Corner and the
graduate student bar, but it gets stale around page ten of
Paradigm 21. Mr. Werner clearly has it out for his old
boss. At the same time, he strives to prove his poststructural bona fides
(you can tell he’s earned a Ph.D. in bad composition from someplace
or another).
Werner writes that “Montebello, Krens and Kimmelman serviced the
same john, it’s just that Krens wasn’t as much of a hypocrite.”
Not only is such a statement untrue, it is also unhelpful. No, the
museum world won’t be saved by the Age of Werner. It will
survive, thanks to bankers like Morgan, tycoons like Frick, and
directors like de Montebello. It is good writing and good
editing, similarly, that will save the publishing world, and not
screeds like Werner’s Museum, Inc.