Window, mirror, and prism.(Corning Museum of Glass decorative arts exhibition)(Essay)

The expansionist mania that has gripped art institutions worldwide is paralleled by a confounding phenomenon: as more museums are built, the more similar they seem. Although public collections have always followed fashions in taste (and revisions of the historical canon), today's unprecedented emphasis on contemporary art and avant-garde architecture as marketing tools has made it hard to tell where you are. The current economic crisis is sure to curtail the proliferation of brand-name "destination" buildings filled with Serras, Koonses, Murakamis, and Hirsts. But well before the ensuing retrenchment, collections with a distinctive, even idiosyncratic, personality were attracting new adherents, thanks to the intimate scale and personal connection disdained by museums that bought into the grow-or-die imperative of the corporate jungle .Tellingly, the outcry unleashed by the projected move of the Barnes Foundation collection--from a Philadelphia suburb to the city's museum mile--reflected fears that a beloved cultural oddity might lose its quirky character in the transition. Sadly, such cautions have not prevented others institutions from subverting, even wrecking, their unique qualities with ill-advised expansion program "to bring us into the twenty-first century."

Until the hedge-fund and real-estate bubbles burst, skyrocketing prices for painting and sculpture prompted several museums to make major commitments to the decorative art--Atlanta's High Museum and the Indianapolis Museum of Art come to mind. Furthermore, decorative arts exhibitions habitually attract large audiences, an important consideration when admission receipts can compensate for shortfalls in public funding and private philanthropy.

Such specialist departments within generalist institutions are likely to gain greater respect in the years ahead. However, the monothematic decorative arts museum might well point the way to the future. A model of that type is the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York. Opened in 1951 and sponsored by the venerable glass manufacturing company, this exemplary institution has nonetheless sometimes been viewed with condescension in certain quarters as an implicit advertisement for the Corning firm's commercial activities.

That is likewise true of several other decorative arts venues, like the Vitra Design Museum in Weil-am-Rhein, Germany (a modern chair collection established in 1989 by a high-style furniture manufacturer), and the Abegg Stiftung in Riggisberg, Switzerland (the world's foremost historical textile research facility, founded in 1961 by a fabric tycoon and his American wife). However, at a time when fashion conglomerates buy retrospectives at prestigious museums to hawk their wares as if they were art, the forthright connection between subject and patron at the Corning Museum looks as transparent as the company's glass.

Despite the seemingly narrow theme of the museum and the relatively remote location (in the Finger Lakes region of New York), the city of Corning has become the state's third most popular tourist attraction, outdrawn only by New York City and Niagara Falls. The Corning Museum's stewards have demonstrated an independent outlook and an eye for excellence that are embodied in its newest architecture: the superb addition by the New York husband-and-wife architects Henry Smith-Miller and Laurie Hawkinson, who are highly esteemed within their profession but perplexingly underappreciated outside it (see Figs. 1,2).

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