The museum of the Third Kind: in which the author envisions new directions for the art museum as audiences change, architecture evolves, institutions subdivide and electronic resources expand our capabilities and expectations

They favor active, participatory recreation over passive, institutionalized forms. They prefer indigenous street-life culture--a teeming blend of cafes ... musicians ... small galleries ... where it is hard to draw the line between performers and spectators. They ... want to pack their time full of dense, high-quality, multidimensional experiences. Seldom has one ... expressed a desire to get away from it all. They want to get into it all ... with eyes wide open.

--Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (and How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life), 2002

Profound shifts.., have occurred in recent contemporary artmaking.... The strangest undercurrent informing these tectonic shifts ... is the Internet, the global reach of which has eclipsed Marshall McLuhan ' s predictions.

--Chrissie Iles, Introduction to The Whitney Biennial, 2004

I prefer to think of [your] "Third Kind" as a place of passion ..., not grand or majestic but committed to the drama of risk-taking.

--Renzo Piano in conversation with the author, 2005

As museums throughout this and other lands struggle to grasp the meaning of a new century charged at once with promise and peril, it's clear we must find a new language to express what's coming: new forms of building; larger, more demanding, more fragmented audiences; and a multiplicity of means of museum-going, much of it "virtual," conducted through varying means of electronic access. (1) Where this critical cultural artifact is concerned, we should consider putting aside our materialist obsession with size, not to say gross attendance figures, and turn to Platonic matters--what we now call "content"--and new, extended types of individual interaction, congenial to an engaged public differing profoundly from its predecessors, in terms both of need and expectation.

Of course this means you and me, the "new audience" that has confronted directors and curators for at least a decade. Despite our drive to participate, we're still faced at every turn with passive, stolid interpretations of museum design. Instead, we should move ahead--toward structures that are cerebral, interactive, quick to change or modify their forms with every new show. We're told repeatedly that museums are expanding, attracting swarms of bodies into their galleries, cafes and shops. The legendary success of the Guggenheim in Bilbao, endowed with the wry charm of Frank Gehry's curvaceous titanium design, is perpetually cited: how, in less than a decade, it has vaulted little-known Bilbao to a place among the top ten tourist attractions in the world.

We've been alternately seduced and threatened by the "Global Guggenheim," the outreach of the museum's CEO, Thomas Krens, whose primarily entrepreneurial vigor has become--in the media and in the popular mind, at least--a standard of judgment for all museum directors. If the "First Kind" museum--the private collections of kings, popes and dukes--has been replaced by the vigorously public museum, beginning with the opening of the Louvre to citizens in 1792 and moving relentlessly toward today's wooing of the mass audience, then the Guggenheim's dominance leads too many of us to assume the "Second Kind" is our permanent destiny.

But here I argue against prevailing wisdom, for reasons beyond the recent evidence of damaging overreach at the Guggenheim--broken budgets, angry trustees, failure to gain approval or financing for an innovative Gehry-designed museum on the East River in Lower Manhattan, and the closing down of Rein Koolhaas's 70,000-square-foot Guggenheim Las Vegas. (2) None of these temporary rebuffs will slow our confirmed materialist museologists, for whom numbers are supreme. Indeed, the satellite Guggenheims that Krens is hoping to establish in Rio and Taiwan--and, we've recently been told, Guadalajara and Singapore--may further extend this embattled genre. (3) Yet I'm still driven to suggest, in a contrarian vein, that the museum's destiny in the 21st century, in scale, content and audience, involves fundamental change; indeed, many museums are already engaged in discovering and developing unfamiliar delights for an unfamiliar audience. I suggest this destiny is neither First nor Second Kind but something entirely new, complicated and surprising--in brief, "Third Kind." This term had its first fully public airing in a talk I gave at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 1997. (4) Briefly put, "Third Kind" connotes a protean, de-centered museum that gives primacy to its program, not its material condition or geographical place. Often the "Third Kind" museum may occupy several sites, some temporary, and remain in constant flux, exploring and extending the new media toward which art museums condescended in the past. Today, the entire curatorial community is aware that the interactive digital access provided by the Web must be central, not marginal, in its thinking. (5)