Will there be life after death for the Bellevue Art Museum?

The unfolding drama/discussion about the demise of the Steven Holl-designed Bellevue Art Museum which I mentioned yesterday here continues today with the question Will there be life after death for the Bellevue Art Museum?

News that the Bellevue Art Museum would close Tuesday left many in Northwest art circles sad, shocked and ready to criticize.

Bruce Guenther, senior curator of contemporary art at the Portland Art Museum and former chief curator at the Seattle Art Museum, said he thought Steven Holl's building had a lot to do with it.

"It's an artful place but no place for art," he said. "The building has a beautiful series of arrival and transit spaces inside it, but the gallery spaces never came together as a coherent whole."

Architecture critic Sheri Olson said she's tired of people blaming an architect for failings of a client. "The board wasn't clear about its mission when it hired Stephen," she said. "He took what they gave him and created a great piece of art. They asked him for a building that was art, as well as being a community center and educational facility."

Liz Brown, senior curator at the University of Washington's Henry Art Gallery, agreed with Olson that Holl's building is a work of art in itself. "As an object, it's quite extraordinary, but as a museum, difficult to work with," she said.

This story has a lot of interesting aspects: the shallow support for art museums, the critical importance of the client in directing a design, the sad vanity which prompts self-conscious effort to create "art," the fickleness of taste (Holl will be only a dimly-remembered figure in ten years), the unfortunate precedence given to "appearance." And even as a "work of art" ---as a precious object in the landscape --- it's "Corporate Headquarters as Art Museum: Much Ado about Nothing."

Photo credit Seattle P-I

Comments

[John]

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