Who Will Artists Address Letters To Next at the Guggenheim?

Guggenheim director Thomas Krens’ resignation yesterday couldn’t have been more poorly timed. Who will HOMU’s [The Homeless Museum of Art] Filip Noterdaeme address his letter to now that the man behind the Guggenheim franchise is leaving? Speaking to the subject of artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s Everything is Museum, currently at the Guggenheim, Noterdaeme observes how Qiang’s curation of HOMU’s The Incredibly Shrinking Museum side by side the Guggenheim’s latests projects underscores contrasting objectives;

I can’t help but point out how our respective proposals complement each other perfectly, like the Yin and Yang of the museum world. Yours is all about museum expansion via the Guggenheim brand, while mine is about museum implosion, shown with my Incredible Shrinking Museum (ISM)*. Anyone interested in understanding the state of the art museum today need look no further. There you have it in a nutshell: the contemporary art museum is simultaneously exploding and imploding.

Sadly, I expect Noterdaeme’s response to the exhibition will buried in a sea of stories related to the Krens’ resignation (even though he’s “stick[ing] around to run the Abu Dhabi project”) and Cai Guo-Qiang’s “easily deciphered if not terribly original art.”

*The Incredible Shrinking Museum is described by Noterdaeme on his site as “a museum about nothing for a society that has everything”.