The vast spaces of those converted factory buildings in North Adams were to be filled with loans of Sixties Minimalist art-Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, et al.-from the collection of Count Panza di Biumo, and we were asked to believe that the audiences that flock to Tanglewood each summer to listen to the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms would be eager to spend their daylight hours gorging themselves on Judd boxes and Flavin fluorescent-light tubes. There never was any MASS MOCA, either there was only smoke and mirrors. There never was any Massachusetts Miracle there was only subterfuge and debt. Remember the Massachusetts Miracle? It was to the political economy of New England what MASS MOCA has been to the world of contemporary-art museums-a publicist’s invention masquerading as a proud public achievement. The cost was projected at around $77 million just to open the doors-among many other problems, a good deal of toxic waste would have to be removed from the site-with $35 million coming from the “Massachusetts Miracle” economy of the then governor, Michael S. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the state of Massachusetts. The scenario called for this elephantine enterprise to be the joint venture of the Solomon R. What this chimera was supposed to consist of was the transformation of an abandoned twenty-eight-building factory complex in the town of North Adams, Massachusetts, into a world-class museum of mostly 1960s Minimalist art. Yet for several years the illusion of its viability persisted in the press, in certain circles of government, and in the overreaching imagination of the people who dreamed up this bizarre project, which promised to bring to one of the most woebegone areas of the depressed New England economy the biggest (in size) and most parochial (in aesthetic outlook) museum of contemporary art in the world. The likelihood of its ever existing in palpable and functioning form, moreover, was always exceedingly remote. MASS MOCA-the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art-never actually existed, of course, as anything but a bureaucratic and public-relations fantasy. It looks as if the farce known as MASS MOCA is finally over, a casualty of its own inanition and a symbol of the spendthrift ambitions-long on hype and swagger and short on substance-that characterized so many of the excesses of the contemporary-art scene in the 1980s.
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