In the summer of 1998, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum displayed over 100 motorcycles in the appropriately titled exhibition, Art of the Motorcycle (AotM). It was a blockbuster show that drew over 300,000 visitors in New York and over 1.5 million visitors total.¹ Critics and art historians frequently regard the show as a crass and cynical move on the part of Guggenheim director Thomas Krens. It was a historical retrospective of the motorcycle that included bikes made in the US, Europe and Japan. It was a watershed event that reflects the postmodern desire to eliminate the Great Divide between fine art and mass culture, as well as the undeniable link between art and industrial design; but the exhibition raises questions. Was this a serious project or a cynical attempt to generate revenue? Does this exhibition belong in an art museum? If it belongs, what does that say about the role of art museums? Given the realities of the contemporary art world, it seems Art of the Motorcycle was a serious project, production motorcycles are worthy of display in an art museum, and the exhibition was especially appropriate for the Guggenheim.

Critics seem eager to dismiss the AotM show as a crass and cynical attempt to generate revenue for the Guggenheim. Jed Perl has been particularly outspoken, denouncing the show as "bottom feeding for the fashion conscious."² He also rails against Krens for being a bike aficionado and for accepting BMW’s sponsorship of the show. As he sees it, AotM is nothing more than the Art of the Deal, an exhibit designed to fulfill macho fantasies and satisfy Wall Street.³ BMW apparently gave Krens a motorcycle, though he eventually returned it.⁴ In his review for the September 1998 issue of ARTnews, Rick Woodward wonders whether the point of the show was to explore mechanical innovation or to help a financial supporter sell product.⁵ James Hyde, writing in the December 1998 issue of Art in America, calls the exhibition a "dressed-up trade show" with exquisite presentation.⁶ In the book Art and Its Publics, Andrew McClellan accuses Krens of "reducing high culture to the lowest common denominator under the guise of postmodern populism. Whatever sells to the largest number regardless of standards, who comes or what they experience."⁷

Perl, McClellan, and others correctly complain that the show was a crass and cynical endeavor; but we should never pretend that art museums have ever been altruistic entities. They have always moved under the impetus of monetary wealth. Alan Wallach divides the history of the American art museum in the 20th century into two phases: Robber Baron and Blockbuster. The Robber Baron phase lasted from the 1900s to 1960s, a period when "financial magnates possessing undreamt of wealth took over the boards of trustees at New York’s Metropolitan Museum and at other big city museums."⁸ They supported museums as a philanthropic gesture. Some donated money to aid construction of impressive buildings such as the Art Institute in Chicago. Others donated their collections of Old Master paintings to help fill these buildings. They brought culture to the masses as they positioned themselves to control what was shown.

The Blockbuster phase began in the 1960s and continues to this day. Wallach traces the origin to the 1963 exhibition of the Mona Lisa at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, but he attributes the show’s wild success (over a million visitors in one month) to the expansion of American higher education beginning in the late 1950s and the publication of H.W. Janson’s History of Art in 1959.⁹ This supplied a new museum audience comprised of students with at least a year of college and some knowledge of art history. The success of the Mona Lisa show brought a new breed of museum director. Thomas Hoving was the prototype. Wallach describes Hoving as an "upper-class renegade with undisguised populist ambitions" and "an extraordinary flair for publicity."¹⁰ These new directors mounted bigger, more ambitious exhibitions that required ever more resources. To meet their needs, museums turned to corporations and the government for support. As McClellan reports, museums need corporate investment to offset increased costs for transportation, insurance, publications, etc.¹¹ In return, the shows draw a larger audience with increased profit for the museum and increased income for ancillary businesses. Thus, corporations became the new museum patrons and corporate officers replaced financial magnates on the boards of major art museums.

Over time, this turn of events changed the nature of art museums. Under the robber barons, art museums were ritual spaces of the sort Carol Duncan describes in Civilizing Rituals. Museum space was special. People were supposed to study and contemplate the works of art while observing the rules of behavior normally associated with a library.¹² The artworks themselves were frequently presented as holy relics mounted on white walls or packaged in Plexiglas cases and contextually isolated. Institutions such as the Art Institute in Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art in New York supply fine examples. In the Age of the Blockbuster, art museums increasingly rely on a Culture of Spectacle to bring visitors. As Emma Barker describes it, spectacle is a "form of domination… that dazzles and deceives, seducing or stunning the spectator into submission."¹³ The emphasis on spectacle is best exemplified in the architecture of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao. Some artists and critics fear that the reliance on spectacle bleeds the critical practice out of art, reducing art to a banal cultural commodity intended for casual consumption.¹⁴ Barker states, "In the worst case scenario, art becomes a mere pretext for more direct forms of consumption (in the museum restaurant and shop)."¹⁵ And it seems this scenario has come true.

As McClellan argues, visitors are customers and the union of museums with corporations has generated an emphasis on exhibitions that sell.¹⁶ AotM was clearly a spectacle intended to reach blockbuster status. Motorcycles are visually seductive commercial products. Presented as a historical retrospective, AotM has few educational aspirations. As Woodward notes in his review for ARTnews, the exhibit emphasized sexy racing bikes and omitted engine diagrams or other mechanical information to show how a motorcycle operates. As he put it, the show was "a parade of dumb, gorgeous objects at rest – objects built to be in motion."¹⁷ Facts seem to support McClellan’s claim that Krens "transformed the original Guggenheim into… a virtual rental hall for the display of commercial products…"¹⁸ yet, something is missing. If it is odd to find an exhibition of motorcycles at the Guggenheim, why does MoMa now have a Bell helicopter hanging from the ceiling?

In his 1984 article, Museums, Managers of Consciousness, Hans Haacke describes the art world as an industry and discusses the new breed of museum director. He calls them art managers. They earn degrees from prestigious business schools and treat art as a commercial product. They have the power to mold the public’s perception of art, but they are plugged into Wall Street’s values. Thomas Krens is a particularly successful art manager. He expanded the Guggenheim in ways the Guggenheims never imagined, but at a price. As Haacke and others feared, Krens and his corporate sponsors have eliminated critical awareness and maximized spectacle in the Guggenheim’s exhibitions. But money drives the art world, as it always has.

Whether the money to operate museums comes from wealthy magnates, government programs, or corporate sponsorship makes little difference. The art world will always move in the direction dictated by its wealthiest patrons. The Guggenheim Museum’s board of trustees did not hire Krens by accident. They must have wanted a director who would transform the Guggenheim into a larger commercial enterprise, and they knew what they were getting. Krens had already planned the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCa) in the late 80s. His plan was implemented according to the "consumerist vision of a branded mega-museum, bursting with shops, cafes, hotels, condos, and high-tech exhibition spaces…"¹⁹ This was a museum as amusement park. The only thing missing must have been the "E" Ticket rides. Though the project flopped financially in the early 90s, it lived on as a smaller effort. And the possibilities for profit are still seductive. With exhibitions such as AotM and projects such as the Bilbao museum, Krens has done what he was hired to do.

Critics slather Krens with scorn for his expansion program, but the art museum is no longer simply a collection point for important objects, a structure with the rituals of a library or store. Museums are complex organizations that provide many experiences. As Nick Prior points out, "Scholars can study, hedonistic tourists can ‘do’ the blockbuster exhibitions at speed, ‘informed’ collectors can regularly tackle the intricacies of the permanent collection, and computer-literate schoolchildren can scan the museum’s objects from their desktops."²⁰ The museum is a multi-faceted center for entertainment akin to an amusement park. This is a necessary adaptation, a measure that goes along with corporate sponsorship to bring revenue to help museums survive and thrive. It appears these adaptations have been successful.

Along the way, Krens and his peers completely eliminated any division between high art and mass culture. Since the 1960s, artists such as James Rosenquist and Roy Lichtenstein sought to do this by appropriating the forms and symbols of low art, mass media, and popular culture for presentation in art galleries and museums. Rosenquist used airbrush to paint images from popular culture as massive murals, producing works such as President Elect (1960-1) and F-111 (1965). Roy Lichtenstein transformed the images found in newspaper cartoons into large paintings, including In the Car (1963) and Whaam (1963). More recently, Jeff Koons encased vacuum cleaners in Plexiglas for works such as New Shelton Wet/Dry Tripledecker (1981) to make an ironic statement about the similarities between museum and department store displays.²¹ But Krens went one better. With AotM, he replaced the art objects with commercial products.

Krens was neither the first nor the last to do this. In the 1850s, Henry Cole pushed development of the South Kensington Museum in London as a shrine to applied arts, targeting an audience of manufacturers and consumers of manufactured goods. Objects included samples of metalwork, pottery and textiles from all over the world. They were chosen "based on criteria of good taste and design, rather than rarity, authenticity, or monetary value."²² It was the most popular museum in Britain with attendance rising from 456,000 in 1857 to a million or more in 1870.²³ Right now, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago is showing a selection of electric cars and a prototype SUV with a body made of biodegradable plastics as part of Bruce Mau’s Massive Change exhibition. The show is a giant advertisement for more efficient, earth-friendly materials and technology. Corporations such as Ford and Monsanto are recognized by name. The message seems to be that population growth and industrialization are damaging the biosphere, but new technologies from the show’s sponsors may save us. Massive Change may transmit a timely message, but the exhibition seems every bit as crass, commercial, and spectacular as AotM.

Perhaps exhibitions such as AotM cleared the path for shows such as Massive Change Perhaps Krens, despite his corporate mindset, really is bringing culture to the masses. Nick Prior asserts that Krens’ programs exposed new audiences to minimalism and conceptualism²⁴ while McClellan admits, "Though clearly driven by short-term commercial ambitions, these ventures have opened the doors of high culture to new art forms and, arguably, new publics."²⁵ Yet, the realities of AotM undermine those assertions. Despite its historical undertone, AotM was primarily a hedonistic display of production motorcycles. With their shapely, sculptural, vaguely figurative forms, the bikes mostly suggest speed and sex in endless repetition. The machines offer no more intellectual challenge than a Miss Universe pageant. At least, that seems to be the reading of most critics.

Even so, displaying a motorcycle in an art museum elevates the motorcycle’s status. James Putnam calls this "The Museum Effect." Anything exhibited in a museum gains an aura of importance, authenticity, and significance by virtue of being displayed in a museum.²⁶ This is reinforced by the care and deliberateness with which works are selected and displayed. Nothing lands in a blockbuster exhibition by accident. Therefore, even a conceptually vapid exhibition such as AotM must be regarded as a serious project. If presenting fully operational motorcycles as art objects stretches the definition of art, this is no problem. As McClellan states, "Duchamp’s ‘readymades’ tested the boundaries between the spaces of art and the everyday world, shocking the bourgeoisie and providing inspiration for subsequent generations of the avant-garde."²⁷ Outside the museum, a motorcycle is a motorcycle. Inside the museum, that motorcycle is art, as surely as Duchamp’s bottle rack became art once it was placed in an exhibition.

Here, James Hyde seems most sympathetic to the Guggenheim’s motorcycle show. He talks about the motorcycles’ "purposeful architecture" and the physical appearance of the engines. He states, "It’s impressive to think about how much effort and imagination has gone into making (and speculating on) what is essentially a chair designed to move at 15 to 150 mph."²⁸ AotM was never a deep, intellectually engaging, conceptual exhibition harnessing the power of marketing under the banner of a big-name artist such as Jeff Koons or Bruce Mau. It was always a corporate exhibition presenting the genius of many nameless artists who chose to work in the applied arts.

Seen in the best possible light, the exhibition is a tacit admission that industrial design is part of the art world. Designers are trained as artists, and the notion of artist-designers drove the Bauhaus. Industrial designs exhibit an aesthetic component, and aesthetics in commercial products have grown increasingly important over the course of the twentieth century. Items perceived as ugly ducklings such as Ford’s Edsel or Pontiac’s Aztec die quickly in the marketplace. This collection of motorcycles is inherently attractive, and a historical retrospective of motorcycles is especially fortuitous for an industrial design exhibition. The motorcycle is an iconic outgrowth of the industrial revolution. Invented in the 19th century, they have become progressively sleeker and faster over time.

Automobiles may be more practical and popular, but they are mere appliances compared to motorcycles. The automobile’s full body is its undoing. Like the airplane, an automobile can be streamlined; but it is a simplified, clothed form. The motorcycle presents a composition of inherently complex forms through the relationship of its skeletal frame to the seat, suspension, and drive train. Most bikes manage to simultaneously suggest biological, mechanical, abstract, and figurative elements. The motorcycle suggests the nude in the same way as Duchamp’s painting, Nude Descending the Stairs (1911). Few commercial products manage to be so universally desirable. Even people who would never dream of actually buying a motorcycle look at motorcycles and sort of want one. This seductive quality made AotM wildly successful, even as it drew the wrath of critics.

The evolution of the motorcycle also demonstrates the Darwinian aspects of Louis Sullivan’s notion, "form follows function." In his famous article, "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered" (1896), the architect proposed that natural law would dictate the form of the modern office building. He wrote, "Where function does not change form does not change… Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight or the open apple blossom… over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law."²⁹ This boils down to "form follows function." Now, we interpret the phrase as a design credo where form is a set of possible solutions to the needs of a particular function. Darwin’s notion, "survival of the fittest," governs this. The best form for solving the design problem will withstand the test of time and become standard. The exhibition reveals that motorcycles evolved from and parallel to bicycles, but the basic configuration of contemporary motorcycles was firmly established by the 1900s. Within that configuration, designers apply seemingly infinite variations. The bikes become sleeker, faster, and more sophisticated as production techniques and technology improve over time.

In the best Bauhaus tradition, the motorcycle exists as functional sculpture, and is especially appropriate for display in the Guggenheim. The Guggenheim was always an unconventional museum dedicated to abstract art. It is the result of the patronage relationship between the Guggenheims and German painter Hilla Rebay, but it has never been important. While MoMA began life as a powerful and important repository for the masterpieces of Modern art, the Guggenheim existed only as a mobile exhibition of the Guggenheim’s personal collection of abstract art. This included many works by Rebay, as well as works by Kandinsky, Klee, and Rudolf Bauer. The Guggenheims displayed their collection in hotel suites and penthouse apartments.³⁰ This traveling show constituted the Guggenheim’s Museum of Nonobjective Art, but Rebay had a spectacular museum planned as early as 1930.³¹

It seems that Rebay understood that the museum of tomorrow had to be impressive. Her goals also agree with Carol Duncan’s assertion that "an expensive, showy building would draw the interest of wealthy collectors."³² When the Guggenheims finally built their building, it was according to Hilla Rebay’s vision for a museum. She pushed them to build it, and she hired Frank Lloyd Wright to design it. It is a spectacular building, a striking work of functional sculpture. Its spiral ramp may not be the best form to meet the function of a gallery space, but it is a novel configuration of space.

In light of Rebay’s influence, the idea that this museum’s board eventually hired Thomas Krens, and that he filled the building with more functional sculpture in an exhibition designed by Frank Gehry makes perfect sense. Under Krens’ leadership, the Guggenheim has grown increasingly spectacular, if not important. It has attracted the money of wealthy corporations, if not wealthy collectors. Prior argues, the Guggenheim has become part of "hypermodern contemporary culture" through "the massive expansion of a high-tech visual arts complex, the rise of mass higher education, and the globalization of the art market"³³ Though Krens continues to expand the Guggenheim’s facilities and global reach, he has been successful because he gathers corporate support to mount popular blockbuster shows such as AotM, and people pay to see them.

In the final analysis, Solomon Guggenheim might have approved of AotM, but Thomas Krens is only interested in the bottom line. Krens’ decision to mount a Norman Rockwell retrospective in 2002 demonstrates that his critics are probably correct. AotM was nothing more than a successful attempt to cash in on the popularity of motorcycles. Other readings of the show are probably misguided attempts to find meaning where there is none. AotM occurred in response to the corporate demand for spectacle. Directors like Krens have only one goal: To expand the profitability of art museums by turning them into amusement parks. Any divide between high art and mass culture is swept aside in the effort to appeal to the lowest common denominator. As mass culture is glorified, any surviving high art must become mass culture or perish.

Under the right circumstances, AotM could have been a serious project worthy of display in an art museum. The machines themselves are worthy of display, but the exhibition would have been stronger if it had accentuated the synthesis of art and design in commercial products. Instead, the show was a superficial exhibition that accentuated the seduction and spectacle of powerful motorcycles displayed in a well-appointed showroom. The exhibition relied on the museum effect for its sense of importance, becoming both cynical and serious at the same time. The exhibition was appropriate for the Guggenheim, but it was presented in bad faith and exemplified unsavory aspects of the museum as amusement park. Yet, The current state of art museums and exhibitions are the result of the social, political, and financial structures that govern them. As with everything in the art world, AotM was entirely appropriate for its time; but this time is marked by a profusion of crass and cynical attitudes and behavior.