Last night, just after publishing the post on theContemporary Art Market, I got to know about the passing away of Frank Gehry – an architect and personality with a close connect to the contemporary art market.
In the early 1990s, the Guggenheim Museum in NY decided to lend its name and collection to an outpost in Europe. Called McGuggenheimization, this franchise model of setting up museums became the eventual template that others like the Louvre, Hermitage and Pompideau adopted. And the reason for this model’s success was Frank Gehry.
When Guggenheim chose Bilbao in Spain as the site for their outpost, they awarded the contract for designing the museum to Gehry. The Frank Gehry-designed Bilbao Guggenheim ended up becoming one of the most iconic buildings of the modern era. It attracts close to a million visitors a year and singlehandedly put Bilbao on the international art circuit map. The Bilbao Effect since then refers to a phenomenon whereby cultural investment plus showy architecture is supposed to equal economic uplift for cities down on their luck.
Check out some of his famous works in the link below specially the upcoming Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi and the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris.
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