Now it can be told: Bloomberg LP will be giving more than $1 million to Richard Koshalek’s “Seasonal Inflatable Structure,” the blue bubble designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro that he announced last December, without providing many “why” details.
It’s a naming gift, and thus won’t be official until the Regents of the Smithsonian Institution meet to approve it this fall. But it’s real, and it comes on top of $1.5 million Koshalek has raised for another part of his $15 million project to put the Hirshhorn Museum on the world’s cultural map — a classroom of the future in the lobby.
Koshalek has never been a man of small ambitions, and his bubble combines elements of the World Economic Forum at Davos and TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conferences. He calls his attempt to insert art into to national and international dialogue “lifelong learning,” and thus part of a museum’s purview, and “a cultural think tank.”
As he told me:
I took the job because of this. If we can develop an educational program that’s national and global in outlook, we can have an impact on cultural policy in the U.S.
I lay the whole story out in a Cultural Conversation with Koshalek that will be published in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal — where there are many more details and examples of the programs he envisions. Let me say right here that lots of people have tried, and failed, at getting the U.S. to have a cultural policy — I’m for some elements of what people call a cultural policy, and against others — let alone inserting the arts into national affairs. So we’ll see.
Now, if this were all Koshalek were doing at the Hirshhorn, he might deserve a little of the criticism he’s been getting for the sin of leaking the initial story of the bubble’s existence to The New York Times last December (but most of that is sour grapes. The whiners/critics should grow up: life isn’t fair).
Once he gets this funded and organized, it will be run by his deputy Erica Clark, who was also with Koshalek at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
That will give him time to go back to the Hirshhorn’s core activities — collection-building, conservation, exhibitions, etc. That’s his main job, and while I am sure he will hobnob at the forums, he seems to know it. His actions will speak for him.