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Warts and all, Gehry's Bilbao is the most exciting public building put up in a long time, and, unlike Wright's canonical spiral in New York, it shows every sign of working well as a place in which to show works of art. There are, of course, difficulties here, because the size of some of Gehry's galleries and their eccentricity of shape is bound to tell against the smaller paintings. Moreover, as a work of art in its own right, the museum is far more interesting than many of its contents--the dull, inflated conceptual art and late minimalism that appeals to the taste of the Guggenheim's Krens. There is a whole gallery of messages from Jenny Holzer; a fatuous "work" by Laurence Weiner in the form of the word reduced written in huge block letters on the wall of its main gallery; another gallery devoted to a single drawing by Sol Lewitt; some huge and utterly banal sculpture by Jim Dine; and so on. And, of course, that one-shot icon of the conformity of late-Modernist official taste, Jeff Koons' Puppy, 1992, sitting outside the museum.
Krens seems to have a fixed belief that bigger is necessarily better and that the significant art of the past 30 years is necessarily huge. Some of it is, of course--like Robert Rauschenberg's enormous Barge, 1963, which the Guggenheim recently bought. But a great deal of late-American Modernism is just arbitrarily big. It's as though the larger spaces of Gehry's design caused the art to inflate by suction. Still, some very big pieces work very well here, notably Claes Oldenburg's soft shuttlecock drooping from a balcony of the atrium, and the curving steel sheets of Serra's 104-ft.-long Snake. It would be a tremendous pity if Bilbao ended up with a great building stuffed with heavy-metal, late-imperial American cultural landfill. What broad public is really interested in such art? For the present, however, people will come for the building.
The interesting thing, of course, will be to see how both the Guggenheim and the Getty "break in"--how these ambitious projects will be used, how they will function in (and benefit) the social matrices of their cities. And that will be as much up to the public as it ever was to their architects.
--With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles