So just how important are negative reviews of a new museum?
That is a question on the minds of officials at the Denver Art Museum and others in the city who must wonder whether the mixed – and often sharply critical – reviews of the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building from some of the nation’s top architecture critics will discourage people from visiting Denver.
When the $110 million expansion was being planned and built, museum officials expressed hopes that the new building would emerge as an international architectural landmark, drawing people from around the world to see the first completed U.S. project designed by Daniel Libeskind.
In the wake of far-from-positive reviews in the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and especially Nicolai Ouroussof’s Oct. 12 review in the ever-influential New York Times, the certainty of the building being that kind of draw is up in the air.
“For all its emotional power,” Ouroussof wrote, “the building seems eerily out of date, and its flaws readily apparent.”
The verdict of some critics: The building is interesting to look at, but its slanted walls and tilted ceilings make it a questionable showcase for art.
Blair Kamin, a Pulitzer Prize- winning Chicago Tribune critic who had a mixed take on the expansion, believes that such negative comments will reduce out- of-town visits and damage the building’s chances of achieving the same impact as the 1997 opening of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain.
“The bad buzz as a place to show art certainly isn’t going to help,” Kamin said. “The negative or even middling reviews work against the Bilbao-effect phenomenon that you get, at least potentially, from a rave.”
Robert Ivy, a fan of the building, is not so sure. Such a dampening effect might have occurred if the reviews were total pans, said the editor-in-chief of Architectural Record magazine, but most critics took a middle- of-the-road approach, and several are enthusiastic.
That the addition is a distinctive, high-profile project by a major international architect will be reason enough for the curious to come to Denver.
“Even those who might have read a mixed review will want to come and see this and make up their own minds,” Ivy said. “I think very few people would be turned off and cancel a flight.”
Accentuating the positive
Local officials, who have professional and personal stakes in making the building a success, are putting a positive spin on the swirl of press.
Lewis Sharp, the art museum’s director, said the institution knew the choice of Libeskind and his unconventional aesthetic would stir controversy. But he believes any barbs in the press are offset by what he called overwhelming public approval.
“It’s a great building,” he said. “I’m just thrilled to be the director of it. I think the collections look brilliant in it. I think the public loves it. I couldn’t be happier.”
Jayne Buck, vice president of tourism for the Denver Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau, believes the critical dissent might even help boost visits.
“I think the press sparks dialogue and the need or desire for people to see and experience it for themselves,” she said. “Often, that’s the best press you can get – where there’s a bit more dialogue.”
One person who still plans to make the trip regardless of the reviews is Kate Greenberg, a publicist for a New York publishing house. She photographed the Libeskind-designed Jewish Museum in Berlin and plans to do the same in Denver.
“I must admit, I was a little put off and saddened by the New York Times review,” she said, “because I am a large fan of Libeskind’s and I feel as though he has been through so much public humiliation lately, and this was just another blow.”
Sharp defiantly rebutted certain specific attacks, such as criticism by Christopher Knight, art critic for the Los Angeles Times, of the way the museum suspended a striped painting by Gene Davis on a pitched wall.
“We’ve hung that painting in any number of spaces,” Sharp said. “It’s never looked better. How do I respond to criticism like that?”
Regardless of how one interprets the reviews the building has received, nearly everyone agrees that they will have little or no impact on how posterity views the building. Great art museums haven’t always scored well in the early going. The Pompidou Center, a gnarly weave of exposed pipes and ducts that houses a contemporary collection in Paris, got a critical boot at its birth in the 1970s. Three decades later, the design by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano is revered, and the museum is among the most-visited cultural institutions in the world.
“The reviews from the critics are a classic first rough draft of history,” Kamin said. “I would bet against this building going down as a masterpiece, but there were people infuriated by the Guggenheim (Museum) in New York and said it was a horrible place to show art, and yet it is beloved.”
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
Here are excerpts from some of the reviews of the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building:
“The new addition to the Denver Art Museum captures all of the contradictions within Mr. Libeskind’s oeuvre. Its bold, often mesmerizing forms reaffirm the originality of his talent, yet its tortured geometries make it a daunting place to install or view art – hardly a minor drawback. And for all its emotional power, the building seems eerily out of date, and its flaws readily apparent.”
Nicolai Ouroussof, The New York Times
…
“It is a startling, sometimes over-the-top piece of architectural sculpture, a surprisingly sensitive shaper of urban spaces and a disappointingly spotty art museum in which basic functional problems have not been adequately solved. … Perhaps the addition represents a cautionary tale for the era of globe-trotting star architects, a warning against irrational exuberance, in which the knock-your-eyes-out container overwhelms the art it contains.”
Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune
“If showstopping design is what it takes to pull in the public these days, fine. But frankly, I’m more impressed by what’s going on inside the Denver Art Museum than by its new trophy building, a very good but not great piece of architecture.”
Martin Filler, House & Garden magazine
…
“There’s no denying the eccentric excitement of a building that’s encapsulated by ‘Hot DAM,’ the Denver Art Museum’s new marketing slogan. But that changes the moment you enter the galleries. … DAM admirably took an architectural gamble, which institutions rarely do. But risks are – well, risky. Here the result is an array of the least congenial galleries for art that I’ve seen in 20 years.”
Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times
…
“In contrast with its ponderous, earthbound neighbors, his museum looks ready for a springy takeoff. But it is Libeskind’s sure- handed site planning – a quality that New Yorkers never fully appreciated – that forces the self-involved beauty contestants to behave in a collegial and civic way. That Libeskind’s museum achieves such a degree of urban grace, without forcing itself into a background role, is an achievement.”
Inga Saffron, Philadelphia Inquirer
…
“Libeskind’s museum addition … is the most captivating building to appear in the U.S. in a while, the first to compare in complexity, daring and brave-new-world beauty to the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles that Frank Gehry set loose three years ago. If anyone doubts that Libeskind’s ideas are a route to a powerful new model of space and form, … this is a building to change minds.”
Richard Lacayo, Time magazine
…
“Everywhere shards and fragments of the thing lurch out unexpectedly. It is an exhilarating experience. Like an inverted, extruded and exploded piece of origami, Libeskind’s building threatens to swallow itself. Which is part of the problem. For while Libeskind has designed a striking building, … it almost tries too hard for its stated purpose: the exhibition of art.”
Dan Glaister, The Guardian, London
…
“Before Libeskind, no one knew how to pull these pieces of the city’s cultural nexus into a coherent ensemble. He succeeds with the crowd-pleasing theatricality of a contemporary Bernini. … In Denver, it’s tragically clear just what New York has given up in trashing just about every life-enhancing element of Libeskind’s master plan at ground zero.”
James S. Russell, Bloomberg.com
…
“Whether you like this sort of mannered architecture is a matter of taste. Frank Gehry’s swirlings and churnings have always seemed lighthearted and whimsical, buoyed by a take-it-or-leave-it quality. Libeskind’s forms strike me as aggressive. Standing in front of his building is like being buttonholed by someone shouting insistently in your face, ‘And this! And this! And this!”‘
Witold Rybczynski, Slate magazine
…
“In a city where a 40-foot- high blue concrete bear stares into the glass walls of the convention center nearby, a 120-foot-high tumble of extreme origami doesn’t look out of place. Had the interior of the museum matched the show outside, Libeskind’s triumph would be complete and Denver would be home to one of the nation’s finest museum buildings. But it doesn’t. … Once you’re done being startled, the inside has a mundane feel.”
John King, San Francisco Chronicle
