I was not going to write about MSN, but it occurred to me that this Museum has a miraculous, therapeutic power. No small thing, like Louis XV's finger to cure scrooges. Well, the newly opened MSN building has the power to unite Poles across political divides. Thanks to the nature of the institution and the architectural form of its headquarters, it has become a catalyst for the emotions of Poles. It has set the Polish political landscape in motion: from backyard Nazis to Warsaw's elite of left-wing activists.
Because of its architecture and what will be exhibited there (for the record, it will be modern art), the MSN is an ideal target for the right, whose followers glue together inept videos of bloody-coprophagic performances from the 1960s with the caption "this is in the MSN!", or glue together "their" architects' renderings indicating what a REAL museum should look like. On them it resembles, vividly, the fascist buildings of the 1930s, well, and it's still white, and after all, the color white is power! In contrast, party poopers on the left are firing back at the museum, claiming that it's too expensive, that there was definitely a scam, and that it shouldn't have any sponsors at all. And in any case not from the automotive sector! Sponsors from the private sector are, after all, capitalists, what poison the earth and demoralize with dollars. Apparently, in order to meet the overleveraged needs of our radicals, one would have to hire an architect of the likes of Piacentini or Speer (he just has to be a patented Pole, you know) to propose something like the Zeppelin Field or EUR, but at half the price. On top of that, everything should be financed with public money. And if it can't be, that the donor should be OUR state-owned company or at least a very Polish dairy cooperative. Then there will be no controversy, because, after all, everyone likes the milk of Polish Muciek and "hegemonized" cheeses, and we have the archetype of the Greek portico and tympanum deeply imprinted in our brains thanks to soothing images depicting borderland mansions.
All this is accompanied by an article in "Gazeta Wyborcza" under the headline "It's not the 1990s anymore!", the author of which claims that cooperation with sponsors is a relic from a bygone era. I must correct: the private sector in the 1990s was, to put it mildly, very reluctant to pour money into anything that wasn't sports, or repairing a church roof. The article criticizes the selection of one of the main sponsors in the form of a German car brand. Because, it is well known, the car is evil itself: it poisons, destroys cities and is a pretentious sign of status. Reading the article, one might come to the conclusion that no one wants to work with any car brands in the cultural sector anymore. Well, nothing could be further from the truth: automotive brands sponsor the following museums TODAY, not just in the 1990s: MoMA, MoMA PS1, Tate Modern, Guggenheim, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, National Museum of Modern Art Seoul or even the National Gallery in Berlin.
Not to mention minor exhibitions and festivals. I'm sorry: not only have cars become part of our cities, for better or for worse (and I believe it is possible to eliminate these "bad" consequences of their presence over time, including by diminishing the role of cars!), but these pesky vehicles have also crept into the work of dojchmark-bought museums and artists. From Chris Burden nailing a hunchback and Keith Haring covering a German racer with his "paint job" to MSN's "audiola." Seriously, though: criticizing a cultural institution (which is supposed to have an international reach while serving a public mission) for working with sponsors is ridiculous. The article author's claim that in an ideal world everything should be covered by the state, in itself signals that this world is not ideal after all. The fact is, it isn't: by some miracle, there is always a hole in public institutions (in this case, in the funding of the museum's program) that no ministry or state-owned company can patch. That's why institutions like MSN have no choice but to find themselves between the hammer and the anvil, that is, between the desire and at the same time the condition for fulfilling the public mission, expressed, for example, through low ticket prices, and the need to meet the terms of cooperation negotiated with the private sector.
Why am I writing about this? Because I see MSN as a swallow of a paradigm shift, especially with regard to the aforementioned openness of private sponsors to support culture. For almost three decades, as an architect, artist and consultant, I have dealt with Polish museums, BWA galleries and NGOs. All of them were barely spinning. The private sector's contribution almost never exceeded 10 percent of the cost of projects, the rest of which was covered by various forms of state administration under the assumption to give as little as possible, because "culture is parasites." With directors of institutions, curators and activists in the NGO sector, we wrote dozens of grant applications. For example, consciously inflating costs, because it was known that reluctant officials in the magistrate's office would cut them, on principle and without substantive reasons, by half. Snip! As a result, everyone involved in the process rode on the lowest rates, resulting in a mass exodus from a sector in which it was impossible to survive wanting to own an apartment or have children. Finally, albeit belatedly, looking at the rising cost of living, there is now a chance to change the situation. Why put a stick in the spokes of these changes? Out of reluctance pretending to be concerned about the public good? I think my own disgusted Polish father put it well: "Or maybe we just don't deserve either this class of museum or European-level culture in general?".
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