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University galleries are making art education accessible while their more commercialised counterparts have "shamelessly surrendered themselves to consumer imperatives", argues Alana Shilling-Janoff.

Imagine an expansive, enclosed glass atrium dotted with potted ficus trees, the arboreal hallmark of the bourgeoisie. Amidst the subdued hum of conversation, visitors complacently mount escalators. Down below, others meander along an underground walkway, between shops and a strategically positioned café.

The tableau would seem to suggest a suburban shopping mall. Instead it is an art museum and a venerable one—the East Building of the National Gallery in Washington D.C. It is no accident that the East Building, construction of which began in 1971, echoes the aesthetic of the vertical malls then in vogue. Designed by I. M. Pei, the East Building was intended to attract people, pairs, groups, crowds. More abstractly, it was positioned as a celebration of capitalism. As architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable observed, the East Building glorified “the consumerism of culture and commerce.” Another I. M. Pei museum exudes a similar consumerist gestalt, though the space conjured is more akin to an airport than a mall—the pyramids at the Louvre... Keep reading on the Boston Review

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