Page 98 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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period suggests the visitors it attracted were from the upper income brackets.
Plaza notes that while the Guggenheim brand name is not an infallible guaran-
tor of prosperity, it did connect Bilbao to American capital and to the global
news media which is dominated by US news-agencies (2000: 267–73).
While the Basque administration’s policy had generally been to enhance and
support the regional culture, the Guggenheim Bilbao represents a US domin-
ated culture of international modern art. In a study of the contemporary
relations between corporations and culture, Mark Rectanus describes the
museum as a ‘depot’ for the Guggenheim’s growing collections (2002: 180). He
suggests that the Bilbao museum’s exhibitions and acquisitions policy is in
keeping with a larger tendency of globalization to erase ‘differences between
museums based on either regional, national or even arbitrary patterns of devel-
opment’ (Rectanus 2002: 180). The franchise character of the museum prevents
it from contributing significantly to cultural development in the region, while it
absorbs the local government budgets for culture. The primary benefit to the
Basque country is economic, though even this is hotly disputed (Gómez and
González 2001: 899). It relies on the museum being unique, and the architecture
of the museum by Frank Gehry is a prime attractor.
The Gehry style promises to give to the museum a distinct identity while at
the same time connecting it with Gehry’s buildings elsewhere in the world.
Gehry buildings are characteristically geometrically complex and illusionistic:
computer-modelling is used to produce curved structures out of frameworks of
steel girders, which are then covered by a skin of reflective stainless steel. The
style is global in its lack of attachment to the building traditions, materials or
climate of a specific location, postmodern in its emphasis on surface and sym-
bolic form. The curves of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao may resemble
Basque fishing boats, but it has been also read as distinctively North American,
its ‘voluptuous’ and ‘monumental’ character revitalizing US architecture
(Goldberger and Muschamp cited in Rectanus 2002: 181–5). The museum is
the product of both the economic need to emphasize a local and unique visitor
experience, and an increasingly homogenous global system of franchising and
marketable visual identities (Gómez and González 2001: 899).

Interactives and hands-on science

A similar political transformation can be found in interactive science exhibits.
We have already seen that exhibition designs involving interactivity took on
different significance in different social and political contexts (Chapter 2, sec-
tion 4). The sociologist Andrew Barry writes of how ideas about interactivity
circulate between museums and how interactivity was not invented or discovered