So the news that Helsinki and the Guggenheim foundation are making a feasability study together to bring a Guggenheim to Helsinki has had a little time to sink in. Allowing first reactions to fall away and think about the different scenarios that a Guggenheim coming to Helsinki might produce will not only help shape our opinion as to whether its a good idea or not, but hopefully give some insights generally into the mash of art, tourism, and urban policy in Helsinki.

Helsinki certainly seems to be chasing the Bilbao¹ effect but the Guggenheim itself has tried and failed to repeat the formula first tried in Bilbao. What then does the Guggenheim offer to a city and at what price? Is this a  Cultural or Economic Proposal? They have frequently been compared to McDonalds or a high fashion brand, mainly because they appear to act like a franchise, but how accurate is this picture?

Franchise

A Franchise is where one company will buy in another companies’ business model and brand, McDonalds being the most famous international example. Their outlets are not owned or run by the McDonalds company itself  but along the lines that the company imposes. The Parent company then charges a fee for this bluepint. I’ve heard it said that McDonalds is less a restaurant business and more a mechanism for extracting higher rents from low rent properties.

By this definition then New York and Venice are not Franchises but the core Guggenheim ‘art gallery model’. The Bilbao, Berlin, Las Vegas (closed) and Abu Dhabi²are run according to a Franchise model and each additional gallery is used as leverage for the next. Look at Bilbao as the first of these Franchise galleries and the shining example. However how good really are they at this Franchise business? Thomas Krens, then Director of the Foundation has admitted it was the Basque government who approached him with the art gallery proposal. So The Guggenheim stumbled into their Franchise model and have been struggling to make it work ever since. Berlin,  Abu Dhabi and Las Vegas have all followed but failed to repeat Bilbao’s success. Infact the Koolhaas designed Las Vegas Museum closed after 15 months in 2002, and the Guggenheim has at least been involved in studies for locating in many other cities globally which have either never got off the ground or shelved.³

But the Guggenheim has become a global brand nevertheless ⁴. With an Impressive global reach which still must be a significant temptation to many cities with ambitious plans to put themselves on the world map, and despite the many near failures and partial successes since Bilbao the shear impact of Bilbao keeps the city majors lining up. Pre-Guggenheim the city of Bilbao had about 100,000 non Basque tourists a year. Post Guggenheim that figure is a staggering 800,000⁵ But this was a high cost public investment approaching 400 million dollars to finance and it came in an overall package of city redevelopment. A Guggenheim could then be said to be either an economic activator par excellence, a beacon of what art investment can do for a city,or by turn the ultimate white elephant.

In Helsinki

So it’s safe to assume that any Helsinki Guggenheim will be according to the Franchise model. What might this include? Probably the building of a new art gallery in Helsinki in a prime location and paid for by the city and/or government. The running of the museum wholly by the city with a fee paid to the Guggenheim for arranging of shows etc. Helsinki will get the shows already doing the rounds in the Guggeheim and the exposure of their city to the brand halo effect. There might be further clauses in this deal including or not the signing over of city artwork partially to the Foundation and further purchase agreements in this regard⁶.

As well as there being many private and a few state funded art galleries, the city has a substantial and high quality art collection and supports at least three art galleries. Tennis Palace, Meilahti, Kluuvi⁷. Also Helsinki boasts the Kiasma which appears prima facie to have just the same profile a Guggenheim gallery might posses, therefore another such gallery appears redundant already. Personally I think the cities art assets are underutilised and underrated, and they could do something better with what they have now. However I worry that should a Guggenheim come to Helsinki then there would be much consolidation of the other city funded galleries and the cities own collection, expect these other galleries to close under the gloss of the headline announcements. Would this really help the long term art or culture of Helsinki? I doubt it. Also worth noting is that  Bilbao has a veto on additional Guggenheims for Europe. Any likely rival to Bilbao might be vetoed by the Basque government.

Conclusion

I wonder if Helsinki City Council  in comisioning a 2.5 million euro report for a Guggenheim has done its’ homework properly? I hope they expected a few things before they made this decicion. That they checked they would have the money to build and run a world class art museum. That the more committed they were to its success the less likely Bilbao would be to sanction its’ building. Whether in their own minds this is an art or tourist decision. If a tourism and financial one then I hope they thought again looking at the chequered history of ‘francise guggenheims’.

The Bilbao plan was holistic it covered the whole city, public transport, music hall, waterfront regeneration. Guggenheim was a name to import with instant credibility but backed by a general renewal of the city. Where Bilbao desperately needed employment diversification and an art infrastructure where there was none, Helsinki is the opposite in this respect.

This post hasn’t  been about locating the Guggenheim geographically but in broader terms how it might fit into the city. The art of a city like its literature and music and Architecture both is a natural by product of and essential to the wholeness of any idea of a city as opposed to just being a place to live. But unlike Literature which is endlessly reproduceable, its value is partly encoded in the object itself, no one takes a flight to see a reproduction. Where it is in the world and how its shown can’t be seperated from what it stands for in any easy way. This is the double edged sword of the Guggenheim Franchise, the fruits of the tree might be bigger and juicier and often drop in the garden but the tree is owned by another. A city like Bilbao trying to break out of the great shadows of Barcelona and Madrid have nothing to loose in this respect, but Helsinki is a capitol, a city with an independant and active artistic culture and landscape. Cities like Helsinki who have a far richer heritage gift than they seem to understand would do well to take a closer look at their own assets and be more daring in trying to forge their own brand than picking one off the peg.

Modest Proposal

Probably what will happen is the report will be made, no Guggenheim will come to Helsinki and life will go on as it did before, so in other words nothing. However what if Helsinki did have enough money and political capitol to build a Guggenheim and run it ? If they have, then instead they should look again in their own back garden which contains some ripe fruits rich for the picking. So here is a more modest back of an envelope proposal.

The Didrichsen gallery is a long established highly respected art gallery in Espoo along the lines of Louisiana in Denmark. Why not approach the Didrichsen with the offer of amount of land or island off of Helsinki and building and funding of much larger gallery for them and the Helsinki city collection. Approach Louisiana to cooporoate on big international exhibitions and become a kind of Baltic axis of art. Home grown, culturally relevant and capable of sitting equally on any international art stage. It will cost the same as the Guggenheim (no cutting corners) but be a braver and more relevant organisation. You won’t get the financial benefits that Bilbao got but if you looked hard you would have seen they weren’t there to begin with⁸.

1. I’ve heard and read it being described as the Guggenheim effect, but as you read through more of the literature you soon see that this way round the title is misplaced [↩]
2. The Abu Dhabi government assume all costs of the construction and running of the museum, as do other franchise purchasers. See New York Times Report [↩]
3. notably two big recent failures in Vilnius and Guadalajara. [↩]
4. Thanks mainly due to Thomas Krens who during his time as director oversaw this fundamental shift in strategy. See this BBC Article and wikipedia page on Krens [↩]
5. See this paper. It gives figures for foreign overnight stays and no. of visitors to the museum. [↩]
6. as with Guggenheim Berlin. See this article [↩]
7. See their home page taidemuseo.fi [↩]
8. I did a fair amount of reading online to write this but there is much more out there still unread including this site, Scholars on Bilbao through which I found much of the meat of this article. It might be that my base conclusion is wrong and that Helsinki would benefit from a significant economic windfall from such a project, call me out if you have a different opinion. [↩]