The Bilbao effect

A THRIVING CULTURAL sector is an essential part of what makes a city great, along with green spaces and immigrants who bring renewal and vigour to city life, according to a recent study by McKinsey, a consultancy. The opening of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in northern Spain (pictured) in 1997, 20 years after the Pompidou Centre, shows how an imaginatively designed museum commissioned by an energetic mayor can help turn a city around.

Visitors’ spending in Bilbao in the first three years after the museum opened raised over €100m ($110m) in taxes for the regional government, enough to recoup the construction costs and leave something over. Last year more than 1m people visited the museum, at least half of them from abroad. This was the third-highest number ever, so the building continues to attract visitors even though the collection on display is modest. Other cities without historic cultural centres now look to Bilbao as a model for what vision and imagination can achieve.

Over the next decade more than two dozen new cultural centres focused on museums are due to be built in various countries, at an estimated cost of $250 billion, according to a study by AEA Consulting, a New York firm that specialises in cultural projects. Contracts have been signed and concrete is already being poured on some of them.

The most talked about are Saadiyat Island, a museum complex in Abu Dhabi that will be home to local offshoots of the Guggenheim and the Louvre, and the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong, which will house M+, the new museum of Chinese contemporary art, Hong Kong’s answer to London’s Tate Modern.

M+ has secured two large collections of Chinese contemporary art through a mixture of gifts and purchases. One is a large holding built up by a former Swiss ambassador to Beijing, Uli Sigg; the second was accumulated by a mainland businessman, Guan Yi. The decision to award the 38 pieces to Hong Kong rather than to a mainland museum ruffled feathers in Beijing. With four years to go before M+ opens, it is already set to become the leading institution of its kind in the region.

Plans are also well advanced for new cultural hubs centred on museums in Saudi Arabia (Mecca), Australia (Perth), Albania (Tirana) and Brazil (Belo Horizonte). And what will be Europe’s largest museum, the Mystetskyi Arsenal, with 50,000 square metres (540,000 sq ft) of exhibition space, is due to open fully in Kiev, Ukraine, next year.

Belo Horizonte, in south-east Brazil, is the town closest to a remarkable art and sculpture park known as Inhotim, founded in the 1980s by Bernardo Paz, a mining magnate. More than 20 galleries are filled with contemporary art, and hundreds of other works, many of them specially commissioned, are spread across 2,000 hectares of lush parkland. Inhotim has become an international art destination, with more than a quarter of a million visitors a year. The new cultural hub will make the city of Belo Horizonte itself part of the draw.

Such cultural hubs need a clear vision of what they can offer if visitors are to come more than once. The new centre in Perth, an expanded version of the existing Western Australian Museum, is relaunching itself as the museum of the Indian Ocean and is already planning exhibitions in collaboration with museums in Mumbai, Muscat, Abu Dhabi and Nairobi. The Mystetskyi Arsenal will open next year with a magnificent show by Ukraine’s best-known artist, Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935). But it is not clear how it intends to fill its vast spaces after that.

The example of the new Ordos Art Museum in Inner Mongolia, beautifully designed by a firm of Beijing architects, suggests that just building a terrific museum is not enough to ensure success. The city of Ordos has sprung up fast and is relatively rich, thanks to discoveries of oil and gas, but the museum has no collections and precious few plans for exhibitions. No wonder it is devoid of visitors. There may be a lesson here for the new cultural centres about to be built in other parts of the world.

Next in The Economist's special report on museums: On a wing and a prayer (3/5)