How did the Guggenheim Helsinki dream go sour?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/04/guggenheim-helsinki-dream-go-sour

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It looked like such a perfect match: one of the best arts museums in the world meets one of the most fashionable countries in the world. Guggenheim goes Finland! But it was all too good to be true: on Wednesday Helsinki city board rejected the Guggenheim Helsinki museum with a narrow vote of 8-7.

What went wrong? The museum was a brainchild of Janne Gallen-Kallela-Sirén, a US-educated sleek and savvy director of The Helsinki Arts Museum, who has made few friends in the Finnish left-leaning arts crowd. His involvement helped the opponents of the project label it "ArtDonald's" that, would spread the western fast art and rip off poor, local artists. The stubborn resistance of many leading artists was probably the main thing that killed Guggenheim Helsinki. But it was also about politics.

The Guggenheim debate demonstrates how the cultural landscape in Finland has changed. Since the 1960s arts and culture have been the protege of the political left, whereas conservatives have favoured more material things like highways, shopping centres – and, of course, lower taxes.

But today art is seen as a creative industry and a good investment. Hence, it was the conservatives who backed Guggenheim, and the left and the greens who smashed it. According to the Guggenheim action plan, the museum would have brought Helsinki so many visitors and so much tax money that it would have more than covered its costs. Some high flyers even saw Helsinki as a northern Bilbao, drawing arts crowds from all over Europe, Russia and even Asia.

It seems that the Guggenheim Foundation wanted Helsinki to produce an innovative and educative arts laboratory, a new kind of museum concept for the future, whereas Helsinki most of all wanted a landmark attraction with a lot of eye-candy for wealthy tourists. The latter would naturally have required some really iconic architecture, and names like Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid were already circulated in people's wildest dreams.

However, the opponents felt that the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation was merely trying to milk the naive Finns: pocket the hefty commission fee and leave Helsinki with all the costs and liabilities of running the museum.

They pointed out the many setbacks that the different Guggenheim projects around the world have recently encountered.

The Vilnius Guggenheim Hermitage, originally set to open in 2011, is mired in an ongoing inquiry into allegations of misappropriation of funds within the municipality. The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, previously due to open in 2013, is on hold because of tightening finances. And The Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin has recently announced its closure in the end of 2012. As if all these arguments would not have been enough to bury the project, the museum became a hostage of some petty fighting between the conservatives and the greens over the post of a Helsinki deputy mayor – a row that had absolutely nothing to do with art nor museums. Some saw the rejection of the museum as the greens' payback for losing that post.

After the Helsinki letdown, Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong will have some serious rethinking to do about the future of his arts franchising network. But also the Finns have to look in the mirror. Only two years ago the whole idea of Guggenheim Helsinki seemed like an impossible dream, simply too good to be true.

But as the project landed, all the wheeling and dealing and petty feuding began. And, in the end, many people, not least the local artists, celebrated the rejection of an arts museum as if Finland had just won the World Cup or defeated an enemy army.

The leading Finnish daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, which had strongly backed the project, warned that after all this squabble other international players might think twice before coming to Finland.

That would certainly be a sad outcome of a seemingly perfect match turned into a messy break-up.

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