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If the twentieth-century art museum was a sober repository of precious objects, the twenty-first-century art museum is a theatrical set for staging multi-media experiences. Rather than being a storage bank of collective memory funded by national governments, the new museum is a vibrant infotainment centre with close ties to multinational corporate and private funding...

In the decade since Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao opened, provincial cities around the world have tried to emulate the 'Bilbao effect' by commissioning spectacular new cultural institutions designed by starchitects.  What is crucial in the case of Bilbao is the museum's central role in transforming the former industrial port into a cultural pilgrimage site for international tourists. For local governments, the promise of the Bilbao effect is that economic and urban renewal can come about via a single monument – that an art gallery can lead the transformation from a post-industrial backwater to an international 'destination'... The image of that particular aspiring city has become so intimately tied to its premier cultural institution that the museum has become the defacto shorthand or logo for the city itself, and the word 'Bilbao', at least outside of the city itself, has become equated with Gehry's Guggenheim...

In a competition entry for the Sheikh Zayed Museum in Abu Dhabi, New York architect Peter Eisenman noted that he was actually designing a building for an institution without a collection, and suggested that the building's design needed to be significant enough to draw international tourists.  The local Arab culture, he argued, was until recently traditionally nomadic and collected little in the way of material culture apart from carpets. Eisenman's museum design, as well as including a carpet gallery, included sophisticated video walls and various design features ('distortions') that might engage the audience. The current absence in Abu Dhabi of 'art' in the New York/Paris sense suggests that the Guggenheim and Louvre franchises will reflect, as in Bilbao, a 'global' culture emanating from the New York–Western Europe axis. The entire cultural experience – its objects, architecture and discourses – is entirely imported, presumably so that international tourists (read 'wealthy Europeans and Americans') will feel at home. In the twenty-first century, the Guggenheim version of 'global' culture is one that rides the waves of trans-national financial flows rather than one founded on the particularities of the local context...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Summer 2008 issue.