The mallification of the contemporary art experience is international, but here in Britain, where entry is free, we lead the world. Last year Tate Modern logged 5.7 million visitors (don’t you love the precision of the decimal point?) and this year, with the added attraction and capacity of Herzog & de Meuron’s new Switch house extension, it’s hoping to swell attendance figures to over 6 million.
Architecturally, malls and contemporary art galleries have much in common: both incorporate awesomely large atria designed to instill a sense of limitless possibility, and both feature Not Found
fancy escalators and rubbish cafés run by stressed and underpaid staff. Ah yes, you say, but here your parallel hits the buffers: people go to shopping malls to shop. Not strictly true, is my reply: visiting malls is a leisure activity. People go to malls to look at stuff and at each other, especially when travelling up and down the escalators, much as the ancient Greeks did in the agora, though without the escalators. Window-shopping is a group activity, a sociable way of servicing a lifestyle. As an experience, the ONS might well put it in the same category as visiting Tate Modern.
In the run-up to the Switch House’s opening we were forewarned that much of its 60% of extra space would be devoted to social interaction. Museums used to be about Please be advised that LiteSpeed Technologies Inc. is not a web hosting company and, as such, has no control over content found on this site.404
“the stairs are wider than we need them; we want to invite people to
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Laura Gascoigne: Reach for the Starchitects – The Switch House
A survey by the Office for National Statistics in May revealed that the British
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are changing their spending habits. Instead of filling our homes to the rafters with consumer durables and not-so-durables, we’re spending our spare cash on ‘experiences’, including recreation and, yes, culture. “People are interested in servicing a lifestyle rather than buying stuff,” one trend forecaster commented in The Guardian, while a senior executive from IKEA predicted gloomily: “In the west, we have probably hit peak stuff”.Does this mean fewer family trips to the mall and more museum visits? The contemporary museum sector certainly hopes so, and to bring the hope closer to reality it is doing it best to make the two experiences as similar as possible. This is an ambition not confined to Britain. Is it any coincidence that Rome’s two contemporary art museums,