Whitney Announces Plans To Open Downtown Building

The (future) Whitney Museum

After nearly two years of haggling, the board of directors at the Whitney Museum have approved plans to begin construction on a new building in the meatpacking district in Manhattan, to be completed by 2015. “Downtown is a new city, a new nation. Why shouldn’t the Whitney be the museum of record there?” said Leonard Lauder, the Whitney’s chairman emeritus and largest benefactor.

Lauder wasn't always so gung-ho however; the cosmetics heir donated $131 million in March 2008, but had been adamantly against the second site until recently. Now, having changed his mind (“there is no better time to build than now, with construction costs and interest rates at an all-time low,” he told the Times), the new Renzo Piano-designed site, to be located near the foot of the High Line, has a $680 million green light.

There will be collateral damage however: because of the size and scope of the project, the Whitney will most likely need to lease its Marcel Breuer-designed original home on Madison Avenue and East 75th Street. And they might just end up leasing it to the Met! An anonymous source told Art Info about the possible indecent museum proposal: “They’ve come to the realization they can’t run two places, and they really want to build downtown. Leonard has given all this money but will withdraw it if they get rid of the Madison Avenue building. This is a way of keeping both buildings and benefiting from it.”

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By Ben Yakas in News on May 26, 2010 6:31 PM

Comments [rss]

FJF

The Whitney building will be an invaluable to asset to the Met. I hope it gives them the opportunity to display their contemporary collection with a finer focus.

wow 14th street

Money always goes these days to the museums

egoistic needs for self aggrandizement and not

to the artists, cool,nothing has changed since

1960 or may B 1860.

TheKlaus

That's a very cliche, teenangsty, dimwitted and myopic view of what is a much larger picture.

The bottom line re: the Whitney expansion has two main facets. First, the current location simply cannot exhibit more than a single-digit percentage of their permanent collection, which is VAST to say the least (a donor recently gave them a few hundred American masterworks from some of American Arts biggest names, so the collection just keeps growing... I mean, you are the art expert and must read about these things in the Times and ArtForum, right?). A larger institution will allow them to show much a larger scope of certain historically important artists, eras, and just give their collection a bigger place to be shown.

Secondly (and this point will hopefully illustrate how simply lame your 'money to artists' assertion is), is that film, video, and audio are utilized by artists now more than ever and the Breuer building was not designed with elaborate AV installations in mind. The place was built as a place for painting, drawing, and sculpture. That's it. The Whitney more than most institutions makes a huge effort to be a leader in film and video permanent collection works. A new building built with AV in mind will not only allow them to exhibit their large scale AV works, but it will be able to accommodate the current and future AV-centric artists more adequately. Especially with shows like Biennials where tons of younger artists get their feet wet and, like it or not, end up seeing financial rewards.

What I am saying is this; by moving from a completely inadequate and antiquated facility with extremely limited installation potential, a relocation to a newer, more modern venue will help artists, the museum, and the public.

Word to your mother.