The new (virtual) Guggenheim?

Not so long ago, it seemed that every city wanted a Guggenheim Museum. The success of the Bilbao franchise of the New York museum chain in attracting a million visitors in its first year of operation in the previously unfashionable Basque city, was a feat everybody wanted to emulate. At one point, 60 cities were apparently on an unofficial waiting list to get their Guggenheim clone.

The first cracks in the museum franchise model began to appear in 2012, when Helsinki decided not to bid for a Guggenheim outpost after an outburst of local protests. The Berlin Guggenheim closed later that year, and since then the waiting list seems to have disappeared.

The Bilbao Guggenheim (photo Greg Richards)

One reason is of course cost. The Basque Government invested $100 million in building their Guggenheim, and a further $20 million on artworks purchased from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to fill it. With cultural budgets increasingly under pressure, no wonder cities are looking for alternatives.

This is where the virtual museum or exhibition seems to be coming into its own. It is almost impossible these days to visit a major city without seeing at least one immersive exhibition by Dali, Van Gogh or Picasso. The Van Gogh Immersive Experience in Shoreditch, London, features two-storey projections of his greatest works with  ‘ethereal soundscapes’ to accompany your journey. This is just one of the many immersive exhibitions being organised in the British capital this year.

The new virtual equivalent of the Guggenheim empire is TeamLab, which has been installing digital art exhibitions in cities such as Los Angeles, Sydney, New York and Istanbul. The scale of these installations is growing as the pockets of the sponsors deepen. The digital art museum Borderless in Tokyo covers 5,000 square meters and attracted 2.3 million visitors when it first opened.  Even bigger venues are now opening: the Jeddah teamLab museum will cover 10,000 square meters.

Forest of resonating lamps (https://www.teamlab.art/w/forest_of_resonating_lamps/)

The group runs its own museums, including Borderless in Tokyo and Shanghai, the teamLab Planet in Tokyo and the teamLab SuperNature in Macau. Future expansión plans include a museum in Abu Dhabi, in the Saadiyat cultural district, a museum in Hamburg in 2025 and other plans in Utrecht, Kyoto and Ibaraki.

Pretty soon there will be more of these immersive experiences than the Guggenheim empire could ever dream of. This go big globalising art model signals a renaissance in museums, which also includes a wave of smaller scale private art museums, and a series of new visitable depots at existing museums (see our earlier blog post on this). The question will be how much of a real museum function will these newcomers have?