Museum’s Maverick Showman

NEW YORK —  When you run into Thomas Krens on a golf course, it’s hard to resist the temptation to propose a deal, that being what you do on golf courses and him being who he is--the unabashed deal-maker of the museum world.

Intercepting him weeks ago on his way to the first tee, you tweak him with a whispered proposal: “Armani-Guggenheim golf shoes.”

“Won’t work,” Krens says back, shaking his head. But he gets the point--he’s gearing up to do some more tweaking himself, of the art establishment: using his Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue for a retrospective, not on a renowned painter or sculptor, but on Giorgio Armani, the Italian fashion designer; and announcing, on the Las Vegas Strip, his plans to expand the Guggenheim into the gambling capital by creating both a gallery within the Venetian Resort-Hotel-Casino and a seven-story museum on a lot next to it.

“Will you get grief?” you ask.

“Probably,” says the man who got plenty--along with record crowds--a couple of years back when he displayed 100-plus motorcycles along the Guggenheim’s famous spiraling ramp.

“But will people come?”

“Of course,” he says, “if we do it right.”

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Today’s the big day--as Krens’ Armani show opens to the public in New York, he’ll be springing his Vegas plans 2,200 miles away.

He says he’s trying to reinvent museums as “platforms of culture.” His critics worry he’s selling them out.

Krens compares art museums to theme parks, saying “you need five rides.” While the art certainly counts (“great permanent collections” and “great special exhibits” are two of the rides) and the building counts (“great architecture”) so do “eating opportunities” and “shopping opportunities.”

After he unveiled his $850-million “Manhattan Project” in April--a proposal for a new Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim along the East River near Wall Street--Krens swore that was it, no more big deals for a while. Two months later, he signed a pact with Russia’s State Hermitage Museum to share collections and pursue joint ventures around the world.

And even as the Brooklyn Museum of Art was condemned last year for secretly taking sponsorship money from British collector Charles Saatchi for its show of his works--including a Madonna adorned with dung--Krens was shrugging off questions about a $15-million pledge to the Guggenheim. It came from Armani. But because the designer was not sponsoring his own show, Krens reasoned, “it’s a non-story. Who do you get to support an institution? People who have relationships with it.”

Krens is “a visionary and an idealist and a provocateur,” says Martha Nelson, the managing editor of InStyle magazine, which is sponsoring the Armani show. Krens didn’t seek her out, either. She was thirsting for ties to the happening Guggenheim.

“He’s willing to rattle the cage a little,” Nelson says.

Krens is 53 now and in his 13th year as director, so it’s hard to call him an enfant terrible. But he remains a lightning-rod figure among museum directors--and perhaps an object of envy--as he gleefully embraces expansion and commercialism, and blurs the line between high and low culture.

“I’m sure they’re all a little nervous about what we do,” is how Krens puts it.

Why?

“I don’t know,” he says, stroking his closely cropped gray beard. “Because I’m tall?”

He’s a big target, indeed--a broad 6-foot-5, unmissable whether in a Hawaiian shirt or in all-black, including the motorcycle jacket he dons when he climbs atop his huge BMW parked outside the museum’s side door since 1998, when BMW sponsored his “Art of the Motorcycle” show.

Myriad Projects Span the Globe

Days after the golf game, he’s a bit further downtown, in new Guggenheim offices across from Grand Central Station. There simply wasn’t enough room up at the flagship Frank Lloyd Wright building.

“I think people expect me to have a map of the world with pins sticking in it,” he says.

He doesn’t--but the white boards around the office do the trick. His jotted notes outline projects at the current branch museums in Venice (on the Grand Canal), in Berlin (on the ground floor of a Deutsche Bank building), in Lower Manhattan’s SoHo district (the one disappointing performer of the bunch) and, of course, in Bilbao, Spain (the acclaimed swirling titanium museum designed by Gehry, opened in 1997).

“There are so many opportunities to develop museums around the world, I need a scorecard,” he remarked last year, recalling how mayors and heads of state--31 at that moment--had come to him, wanting to be the next Bilbao.

Yet it’s by chance that Krens is not just another art professor. Joining the faculty at Williams College in Massachusetts in 1971, he fell into an intellectual clique that debated postmodernist philosophy. But he chafed at being on the sidelines of society, asking the old questions: If they were so smart, why weren’t they rich? Or doing something?

Krens got his opportunity when the director of the college art museum left. He oversaw a $10-million expansion there and began eyeing an abandoned mill complex in neighboring North Adams, which eventually become the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. On the side, he got a management degree from Yale.

By the time he was hired by the Guggenheim in 1988, he had developed his philosophy that museums too often cling to an “18th-century idea” (that they should be “like an encyclopedia, offering one of everything”) inside “a 19th-century box,” these grand palaces. In a world of jet travel and the Internet, Krens argues, museums needed to find the “untold stories.” And who says “it’s got to be paintings, it’s got to be sculpture?”

His is far from the first museum to display a motorcycle or evening gown. But while the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art long have had costume institutes, those take up a small portion of those institution’s vast space. At the Guggenheim, the motorcycles became one of the four major exhibits a year that take over its central winding ramp.

A New Republic review branded it “a dark day in the history of American museums,” a “pop nostalgia orgy masquerading as a major artistic statement.”

But the Gehry-designed show got approving notices too, drew lines of paying customers and inspired a Guggenheim Motorcycle Club, whose members include actor Dennis Hopper and actress Lauren Hutton. But the gift shop still offers a helmet covered in celebrity signatures--selling for $1,000--even as it stocks up on Armani catalogs, $175 for the special boxed edition.

So will Krens, at the Armani festivities, be wearing one of those sexy suits?

“I don’t think so,” Krens says. “There are limits.”

Then he adds: “You know, I’ve not been offered any. And it’s getting kind of late.”

Theater Director Helps Create Armani Show

Barely 24 hours before the Armani pre-opening gala, a $1,000-a-head benefit for the Guggenheim’s international programs, workers are still hauling in mannequins by the truckload. Krens surveys the scene, asking museum staffers, “What do you think?”

He insists he doesn’t care what people say about him. But “you always take a risk,” he acknowledges, “when you do something outside what you normally do.”

This time, he recruited Robert Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning theater and opera director, to design the show. The wire mannequins are torsos only, so Armani’s gowns and suits appear to be floating. Wilson has dressed up the towering rotunda, as well, using translucent fabric to cover the open overlooks along the ramp. It encourages people to focus on the exhibit, he says, “to see the clothes in their sculptural form.”

When the heads of other major art museums around New York were asked to discuss the issues raised by such the show, and the Guggenheim’s move into Las Vegas, none would.

But within the museum world, “there is enormous interest in how far the Guggenheim has pushed the areas of architecture, design and the museum as a place for entertainment,” says Paul Schimmel, chief curator of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

Schimmel comes from a museum that, like most, is always looking for creative ways to lure bodies through the door. He has staged shows examining the relationship between the automobile and society, and between film and art. He admires how the Guggenheim has spotlighted the “overlap between the world of artists and the world of design” and “between high art and [mass] culture.”

“Where Tom pushes the boundaries,” Schimmel says, “is a fascination with the commercial creative world. He’s not looking at the intersections with art so much as presenting the motorcycles and Armani as art.”

Schimmel is not the only one who compares Krens to Thomas Hoving, the Met’s wheeling-dealing former director who helped pioneer the trend toward blockbuster shows (“King Tut” and the like) and boasted how a museum chief, in cajoling donors and art dealers, has to be a “gunslinger, a fixer [and] a toady.” Hoving also recognized the value of buzz.

But while Hoving loved to win it for himself, Krens guides it in another direction--toward what Schimmel terms “the whole idea of the Guggenheim ‘brand.’ ”

So it is that Krens tries to avoid the camera at Wednesday evening’s gala. He simply doesn’t want to be photographed in front of the mannequins. “How’s that going to look?” he asks, recalling how presidential candidate Michael Dukakis got clobbered for posing in a tank some years back.

But isn’t this his show?

Shoot Armani, he says, with those two towering babes around him. And there’s Bobby De Niro. And Pat Riley, the Armani-wearing basketball coach.

Finally Krens relents. But he wants someone else in the photo. He heads up the ramp to find actor Jeremy Irons, another member of the motorcycle club. But then he sees a friendly face in front of a cluster of Armani gowns--his wife, Susan Lyons, a fabric designer. He’s fine now.

“You know what it is?” she says. “He’s shy. He really is.”

Controversy Over Exhibit Expected

Thursday morning is the news conference for the Armani show. Krens makes only brief remarks, introducing the designer, Wilson, and the show’s curators.

One, Harold Koda, notes that their exhibit is sure to generate controversy. He praises Krens’ “courage” for approving a show that enables a museum audience to see “Armani at his most transcendent.”

Then it’s time for questions, and Krens is asked about the money. Yes, “Mr. Armani was moved to do something for the institution,” he says, and he doesn’t dispute that the pledge is about $15 million.

As for putting on a show that may draw heat, “I don’t view it as requiring a lot of courage,” he says. “It’s a lot of fun.”

By the time it opens to the general public this morning, Krens will be in Las Vegas. Plans call for him to be flanked by officials of the Venetian resort, of course, but also motorcycle mates Hopper, Irons and Hutton, and by Dr. Mikhail Shwydkoi, minister of culture of the Russian Federation.

That’s because the gallery within the Venetian will be the Hermitage-Guggenheim Museum, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. Krens sees the stark, steel structure as the embodiment of “icy concrete rationality” that’s a total counterpoint to “this backdrop of glitzy Las Vegas.”

The art inside, however, will be the same sort of crowd-pleasing stuff--mostly Impressionist paintings--that casino magnate Steve Wynn used two years ago in his then-novel gallery within the Bellagio hotel.

Koolhaas also has designed the much larger stand-alone building that will be called Guggenheim Exhibition Hall Las Vegas. Krens hopes eventually to bring an exhibit on Korean art to the 63,700-square-foot space. But to start: the motorcycles.

It’s expected to earn millions.

“Sure I’ve done the math, but I’ve done better than that,” Krens says, explaining how the move fits into the museum’s mission of “cultural engagement.”

“It’s about communication,” he says. “People are there. We’re in the communication business. I mean, if you’re in the missionary business, you go where the heathens are.”

The new facilities won’t be finished until spring. But the heathens won’t have to wait until then to get their first sight of such cultural engagement, Krens style. Saturday morning, the Guggenheim Motorcycle Club will vroom down the Strip.

The Guggenheim’s first fashion exhibition examines Milanese designer’s timeless pieces. E1