George Lindemann Journal - "Pérez Art Museum Miami: Where the Art Will (Hopefully) Come Later" @wsj by Peter Plagens

George Lindemann Journal

George Lindemann Journal - "Pérez Art Museum Miami: Where the Art Will (Hopefully) Come Later" @wsj by Peter Plagens

Miami

Build it, and they will give. Or promise to give. Or lend for the long term. Or something. Those seem to be the operating hopes at the just-opened Pérez Art Museum Miami, ensconced in a building, designed by the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron, that gracefully takes advantage of the view and the climate of Biscayne Bay.

The situation is odd, to say the least. PAMM—a museum of modern and contemporary art in the fifth-largest metropolitan area in the country, with five million inhabitants—makes its debut with a paltry collection: only about 1,800 works of art, almost 300 of those just recently bestowed on it from a single private collection. There's scarcely a showstopper in the trove. By comparison, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (only the fifth-largest city in Texas) has about 2,600 objects, with some instructively important works by the likes of Francis Bacon, Vija Celmins and Martin Puryear among them. Or consider the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which has more than 10,000 works, including just about the snappiest gathering of recent sculpture anywhere.

It's not as though there's no art in Miami, especially in early December when Art Basel Miami—a child of the premier European art fair that has become a bigger deal than its parent—is in town. In terms of private collections of contemporary art open to the public (sometimes called "boutique museums"), Miami leads the nation, with four of the very best: the de la Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space; the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse; the Rubell Family Collection / Contemporary Art Foundation; and the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, which specializes in Latin American art.

Which is where the problem lies. Several movers and shakers in the Miami art world were against the new museum, or at least against building a $131-million edifice for what originally had been titled simply the Miami Art Museum—which had begun collecting only in the late 1990s—before the institution had enough art to fill its space decently. Some even thought that having the city's publicly viewable modern and contemporary art lodged mostly in the extant private museums and university art galleries made Miami's scene desirably unique.

But supporters of a big new museum prevailed. The city agreed to give the museum a prime plot of land right on the water, not far from the arena in which Miami's championship basketball team plays, and right in between an under-construction science museum and a new waterfront park. In 2004, Miami-Dade County passed a $100 million bond issue to finance the museum, and the deal was done. Sort of.

In late 2011, the project ran short of money. Up stepped Jorge M. Pérez, the CEO of the Related Group, a giant real-estate development firm, with a proffered gift of art and cash that's posted officially on the museum's donors wall as $40 million, with the value of the Latin American art he passionately collects accounting for somewhat more than half of that. In return, Mr. Pérez got his name not just on a few galleries, or a wing, but on the entire museum.

In the blowback over what many saw as an expedient personal naming of a museum financed largely with taxpayer money and sitting on public land, a handful of board members resigned, promised gifts were pulled back and—most important—relations between PAMM and the city's biggest collectors were strained if not actually sundered. The problem, bluntly put, is that those from whom the museum might get desperately needed large donations of museum-quality art—especially those whose collections are already open to the public—are not likely to give to an institution after somebody else's name has been freshly affixed to the facade.

You don't open a museum with the art you wish you had; you open it with the art you do have. And, of course, whatever art you can borrow and exhibitions you can import. In this predicament, PAMM (primarily its director, Thom Collins, and chief curator, Tobias Ostrander) have done a pretty good—and fairly creative—job of stretching the museum's art on hand so that it seems, on first glance, to fill 200,000 square feet of "programmable space" (not all of it galleries).

First, they came up with a bilingually accessible theme for the first two cycles of showing the collection: "Americana." The rolling shows, organized into such College Art Association panel-discussion topics as "Desiring Landscape," "Sources of the Self" and "Formalizing Craft," constitute a kind of art-appreciation course attempting to gainsay the conventional wisdom that modern art is basically a Paris-to-New-York enterprise. The exhibition includes examples, from 1938 on, of trenchant art from Latin America. While the old notion of Northern hegemony has been nominally discredited in international biennials and in the programs of such institutions as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (it still holds true, however, at Christie's auctions), and while recent Northern and Southern art is gradually approaching parity, it's difficult to overthrow as a whole. No matter how influential he was in South American modernism, the Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres García (1874-1949) cannot be transformed into a Paul Klee or Piet Mondrian.

Still, the mix-and-match of, for example, the Brazilian Jac Leirner's "Utilidades" (1989), a frieze of consumer logos next to an Andy Warhol "Brillo Box" (1964) is catchy, and quite a few Latin American works, such as Alexander Apóstol's 2005 photographic series on Venezuela's "Skeleton Coast" (under-construction hotels abandoned when a tourism boom went bust) and the Cuban-American artist José Bedia's graphically robust painting of a human torso, "Mama quiere menga, menga de su nkombo" ("Mama Wants Blood, Blood of His Bull," 1988), are right up there with what you'd see at the Whitney in New York or the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The British-Guyanese artist Hew Locke's overhead lobby installation of large, colorful model ships, "For Those in Peril on the Sea" (2011), is an exception to the lack of showstoppers. And though not part of "Americana," a small exhibition of the underknown Cuban painter Amelia Peláez (1896-1968), a great colorist, is a jewel.

The second space-filling device is a retrospective—organized with the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo—of Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist-activist. And that's the point: He's a headliner and he requires oodles of cubic feet in two enormous galleries. The trouble is that Mr. Ai doesn't visually come across well in quantity. He's an idea guy. His most physically daunting piece, the 12-part bronze sculpture "Zodiac Heads" (2010), has been unfortunately located outside the museum, where its impact is minimized. The result is that the museum's biggest gallery feels more like a dining hall being set up for an official luncheon.

PAMM is a brand-new, out-of-the-box major museum in a major city, and it clearly cannot, and should not, limp along on the gifts of merely passable art that come trickling in and on the curators continually having to shuffle the holdings to make it appear as if the museum's collection is more formidable than it is. One the one hand, it's difficult—not to mention painful—to foresee Miami's most prominent collectors in effect boycotting PAMM and letting it wither on the vine or turn into one of those places that survives on shows of "Star Wars" props (yes, there is such a museum exhibition, and it's still touring). On the other hand, the prospect of the museum unnaming itself (although football stadiums rename themselves as frequently as fugitives from the FBI do) to something more civically neutral in order to mollify the objectors looks to be practically nil. Something has to give among all the powers-that-be. Miami is too young and energetic a city with too vigorous an art scene for the museum not to succeed.

Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer in New York.