“My critics like to refer to all this as a franchise. Of course it’s not a
franchise. It is perfectly possible, while respecting the boundaries of what
the Guggenheim was originally created to do, for us to preserve, maintain
and expand our collections, to pursue research and to present our
collections to a wider audience… It’s an obsolete conceit to focus on the
art of western Europe and the eastern United States. We need to be able to
engage with the arts, cultures and traditions of other regions. The
Guggenheim Bilbao, for example, gives us the chance to explore the Spanish
and Iberian culture of western Europe. We are a local institution. In a
contemporary society, I think that is an essential aspect of how museums
have to confront the world.”
The intellectual argument for expansion (Las Vegas excepted) and exchange with
other art institutions is convincing. So is the financial argument, because
the fact remains that the Guggenheim, unlike public museums, cannot rely on
a cent of public funding. The only way to survive, as Krens sees it, is
through growth: “We have a $65 million a year budget and no US state
funding, which puts us under exquisite pressure.” Krens rejects reports that
he has dipped into the endowment in the past for running costs, but admits
that he has used the endowment to underwrite borrowings. It now stands at
$85 million, but he would like it to be three times that figure.
Still, Krens’ aggressively expansionist strategy has rattled some members of
the Guggenheim board. In 2005, Peter Lewis, the flamboyant car insurance
billionaire chairman of the Guggenheim, issued a series of ultimatums and
then attempted to orchestrate Krens’ removal. When that failed, he was
forced to resign himself. Lewis believed Krens had spent too much time and
money on trying to build new Guggenheim museums around the world, while failing
to concentrate on the core work of the Guggenheim in New York. Lewis, who
had been brought in by Krens and who had been chairman for 11 years, had
sunk a total of $77 million of his own money into the museum, regularly
bailing it out when income slumped. His departure must have been a major
financial blow.
“It’s a business. These people get swept along by the novelty of being
chairman of a major museum, and then they begin to think they can make
decisions because they are contributing money… He’s in car insurance, as in
‘sex and drugs and car insurance’.” Krens’ swipe is in reference to Lewis’s
highly publicised support for the decriminalisation of marijuana. And since
Lewis’s departure, Krens has plugged the gap on the board by bringing in a
fresh group of wealthy, art-loving trustees. In the long run, expansion
would benefit the Guggenheim’s coffers, as well as the institution’s potential
for cultural enrichment. Indeed the autonomous Basque Government chipped in
$20 million to the Guggenheim’s endowment when Bilbao Guggenheim
opened. And Krens is now nurturing another much bigger project, which he
hopes will boost the Guggenheim endowment to a far greater degree.
This is the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, which is to be part of a huge
multi-billion-dollar cultural complex on the 27 sq km Saadiyat Island in Abu
Dhabi. Frank Gehry will design the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, on a much larger
scale than his Bilbao museum, and there will also be a performing arts
centre designed by Zaha Hadid, a museum of classical art linked to the
Louvre designed by Jean Nouvel and a maritime museum designed by Tadao Ando.
David Adjaye will be among other leading international architects to each
design a pavilion for an Abu Dhabi Biennale.
Krens seems keen to head off the notion that in Abu Dhabi, the Guggenheim is
merely homing in on where the money is, stressing that the anticipated
funding is merely a by-product of a cultural project that is desirable for
all. “It’s like this. We all need food, and if we happen to find that the
food is delicious,” he says, scooping up foie gras, “then that is a
pleasurable bonus.” He is being disingenuous, surely. The cultural exchange
of art treasures is one thing, but money must have been a large part of the
calculation to establish a presence in the Middle East, albeit one of the
West’s most stable and sympathetic allies. “You have to evaluate the
likelihood of success,” Krens argues. “You have to take controlled risks.
But we have a strategic plan and decisions are made by the board of trustees
based on our achievements in other places and our potential for success.”
Not everyone agrees. Last week in an interview in Le Monde, the Met’s de
Montebello blasted the Louvre, and by implication the Guggenheim, for its
activities in Abu Dhabi, saying he was “uneasy with the excessive
commercialisation of art and the risk that results when money drives us”.
But Krens, like all leading museum directors, is constantly on the search
for cash (whereas de Montebello has the luxury of a much larger endowment
fund to keep the Met afloat).
Given that Krens is such a controversial figure, his critics have particularly
enjoyed digging through his exhibition record and highlighting those that
seem to be linked to this perennial search. Favourite targets are the
exhibition of Giorgio Armani clothing in 2001, which coincided with a $15
million donation from Armani Corp, and The Art of the Motorcycle in 1998,
sponsored by BMW. “Oh, come on. Give me a break,” he says. “We’ve put on 272
exhibitions in the last 15 years, and of those, 92 per cent come under the
category of what I call ‘core collection competence’ [Western art from the
late 19th century to the present]; 4.2 per cent are architecture, design and
fashion, and the remaining 3.8 per cent are pre-modern and non-Western.
We’ve done exhibitions on Frank Gehry, on Zaha Hadid, on design, on fashion,
and all of these subjects are part of a perfectly valid discourse with
mainstream art. The Armani exhibition was curated by Harold Koda,
curator-in-charge at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum… I
mind the resistance all this criticism creates for me. But it’s not going to
change my approach.”
Glenn Lowry, director of MoMA, who studied under Krens at Williams College,
has distanced himself from Krens’ flamboyance, once pointedly commenting,
“We are a museum, not a destination.” But surely anything that helps a
museum become a destination is a good thing – including architecture, which
didn’t begin with Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao, and popular exhibitions that
bring in people who have never visited the museum before. As one critic
wrote of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim building in New York: “You could
line the ramp of the Guggenheim with spitting llamas, and thousands of
people would still come to gawp at the architecture.” Lowry himself is
planning another MoMA expansion, and he has also started encouraging major
corporate donations by mounting exhibitions that stray somewhat from the
mainstream; in 2005, for example, he opened an exhibition called Pixar: 20
Years of Animation.
Talking to Krens, you get the sense of an extraordinarily energetic figure
dedicated to pushing this institution forward in an environment in which it
is harder and harder for museums to survive, let alone flourish. He is
clearly a gambler, but you sense that he is also a dreamer underneath it
all. Before he embarked on his art world career he spent a year in India
printing saris. He lives with his wife, Susan Lyons, a fabric designer, and
their 16-year-old son, Nicholas, in a huge Tribeca penthouse apartment with
high ceilings and a dining room to seat 20 – plenty of room for impressing
potential donors.
He is president of the Guggenheim Motorcycling Club, and he recently went on a
long escapist trip with Jeremy Irons, Dennis Hopper and Laurence Fishburne,
riding through the sands of the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Penisula and
visiting the personalities involved in the Abu Dhabi deal. Both sets of
grandparents came to America from Russia, and he retains a special feel for
that country, an appreciation of the Russian soul. “I’m huge in Russia,”
Krens says, chomping on a foot-long cigar and suddenly abandoning all
pretence of modesty. “They love me there. I’ve organised exhibitions. I’ve
helped the Hermitage. I know people there. I have two oligarchs…” His mind
is back on the nurturing of donors – of art and money – on the expansion of
his empire, on the big push forward.
