The museum of the Third Kind: in which the author envisions new directions for the art museum as audiences change, architecture evolves, institutions subdivide and electronic resources expand our capabilities and expectations

In a sense, Ohr-O'Keefe responds almost point by point to calls lately voiced for smaller, more focused museums. Among these calls is Victoria Newhouse's book, Towards a New Museum, which in 1998 radiated a passion for what she labeled the "monographic museum," centered primarily on single bodies of work (and presenting exhibitions related to that work)--phenomena such as the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Jean Tinguely Museum in Basel and the Brancusi Studio in Paris. (14)

Newhouse is even more committed to structures entirely devised for a single artist's work. By now a tradition in Europe, the artist's gallery/archive, often self-designed, running from Canova through Delacroix, Turner, Gustave Moreau, the Picasso museum in Antibes, Henri Cartier-Bresson, August Sander and more--is a phenomenon that ought to attract more Americans, she believes. The late Isamu Noguchi was among the first when, in 1985, he founded in Queens--a borough becoming a haven for de-centered art--what he called his Garden Museum, nestled within the walls of a converted red brick photo-engraving factory not far from P.S.1. With the museum renovated and recently reopened, the foundation, directed by Jenny Dixon, carries on in his name. Also artist-designed in the 1980s is Donald Judd's notable Chinati Foundation in Mafia, Tex., which has major holdings of Judd's work (including large-scale site-specific pieces) and preserves several of his studios and collections; it exhibits the work of other artists as well. (15)

The immense new Dia:Beacon, though it can hardly be called monographic, qualifies as Third Kind in the intensity of its concentration on highly selective subject matter. Housed in a sturdy steel-and-concrete former box factory, Dia's grand facility allows its in-depth collection of a narrow range of artists a long-term presence in the huge spaces provided for them. (16)

Nearby, the Beacon Cultural Society is breaking ground in the midst of the Vintage Beacon Terminals complex. (17) This intensely hybrid Vision was originally conceived by a group of developers, civic leaders, a former museum director (David Ross, who turned both the Whitney and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art toward both new media and a younger audience nucleus) and Sam Yanes, who pioneered cultural uplift at Polaroid. Though it's too early to call what is developing there a "museum," the society is clearly driven by high cultural goals. It recently purchased the former Beacon High School for use as studios, exhibition spaces and a community center. This unprecedented institution intends to attract private collections, build a kunsthalle and stimulate the making of new art. The result may well be a unique form of art education and presentation for the entire community

As the decades pass, we're going to find more, not fewer, institutions devoted to closer contacts between art-makers and their public, and to rare, specialized subject matter (consider the elegantly academic Museum of Sex on Fifth Avenue in New York, which opened late in 2002). My forecast art museum, which I see coming with a rush late in this decade, will increasingly encompass the exotic, the thematic, even the "green" issue of the environment itself, already Visible in the work of major architects like James Wines, Anthony Walmsley, Norman Foster, Renzo Piano and more. Walmsley and Wines co-designed a significant (if provisionally rejected) entry in a 1998 competition for a National Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar--nothing less than a "Green Museum," which has been widely discussed and written about since. The project was inspired by what Walmsley calls "shifting desert sands," together with the traditional oasis garden. The project mixed low and hi-tech: the walls were also charged with interactive video technology presenting manuscripts and artifacts too fragile to display. (18)