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What a museum chooses to exhibit is sometimes less important than how such decisions are made and what values inform them. To have the crucial role of museum professionals usurped by self-serving tycoons in the name of economic imperative threatens not only the integrity of individual institutions but the very principle of art held in public trust.

Martin Filler

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Martin Filler
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: September 17
Journalist
Colorado Springs
Colorado
Martin Myles Filler
Important
Public
Institutions
Chooses
Exhibit
Made
Names
Role
Museums
Inform
Values
Roles
Crucial
Threatens
Less
Trust
Serving
Professionals
Individual
Principles
Held
Imperative
Art
Name
Principle
Exhibits
Self
Economic
Decisions
Imperatives
Tycoons
Sometimes
Decision
Integrity
Museum
Usurped

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The danger for any artist whose work is both recognizable and critically acclaimed is complacent repetition - the temptation to churn out easily identifiable, eagerly welcomed, and readily salable designs.
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One of the stated goals of the postmodern movement in architecture was a greater sensitivity to the people who live in or use newly designed buildings.
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Winning the Pritzker assures a flood of work in one's seventies and eighties, jobs necessarily carried out by assistants as the demands of modern-day cultural stardom and the inevitable waning of physical capacities prevent many architects from attaining the transcendent final phase more easily achieved by artists in other mediums.
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Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century exponents of prefabrication were certain it would supplant age-old traditions of individualized design and handcrafted construction. The building art would be revolutionized by freeing designers and construction workers from repetitive tasks, and democratized by making high-style architecture more affordable.
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When Oscar Niemeyer died on December 5, 2012, ten days before his 105th birthday, he was universally regarded as the very last of the twentieth century's major architectural masters, an astonishing survivor whose most famous accomplishment, Brasilia, was the climactic episode of utopian High Modern urbanism.
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Any set of decisions about design is inevitably influenced by cultural prejudice, no matter how intent an architect might be to avoid it.
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