The following includes reviews of the French and Italian versions of Museum, Inc., as well as the English original:
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"Sobre las trampas, el falso filantropismo y las miserias del modelo angloamericano de financiación privada mediante 'estímulos fiscales', recomiendo la lectura de [...] Paul Werner, Museum Inc. Inside the Global Art World."—La Fundició, Barcelona.
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"Ne sa qualcosa Paul Werner."—Il caffè corretto.
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"Un pamphlet che in Italia, se riferito alla realtà locale, con ogni probabilità non avrebbe mai visto la luce. Perché qui si tirano in mezzo gli avvocati appena qualcuno scrive nero su bianco cifre e nomi. D’altro canto, se dalle nostre parti già il giornalismo tout court non gode di buona salute, figuriamoci nel mondo dell’arte, dove sostanzialmente non è quasi mai esistito. Detto ciò, i toni di Werner sfiorano effettivamente più e più volte il limite della diffamazione. E non si può che dirlo con tono divertito. Perché? Semplicemente perché quel che scrive Werner è la più cristallina verità, che tutti sanno e nessuno, per l’appunto, scrive.[...] [La visione dell’autore] prende spunto in particolare dalle analisi di Pierre Bourdieu, ma superandole e proseguendole su diverse questioni."—Exibart.
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"In tutto questo, per meglio comprendere alcuni aspetti puramente tecnici, consiglirei la lettura di un piccolo testo di Paul Werner: Museo S.p.A.
Il sapere può essere nella bocca di molti ma nella testa di pochi.
Ascoltare e confrontarsi in modo proattivo è l’utopia." – Angelo Bellobono, opinion, Art Tribune.
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"Le due giovanissime speaker presentano il progetto Youtube Play. Ma quando hanno detto che il loro museo ha fondi molto scarsi e che questo è stato un progetto low-budget, sinceramente ho smesso di prendere appunti, anche perchè proprio in questi giorni sto leggendo Museo S.p.A. di Paul Werner." - Staff blog, Palazzo Madama, Turin, May 2011.
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"Paul Werner n’a pas son cerveau dans sa poche. Son petit livre très drôle explique les rapports aussi étroits qu’incestueux des marchands d’art, des grands collectionneurs et des musées. Le texte, qu’il a lui-même traduit en français, mis en page et publié, est bourré d’aphorismes plus savoureux les uns que les autres." - Nestor Potkine, November 2009.
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"A fin de cuentas, lo que Museum Inc.: acaba por esclarecer es un cambio radical en la actitud y comportamiento del museo - adoptando las maneras del corporativo hacia el plano cultural." - Cadena Ana Monterrey, Industrias Culturales, September 2009.
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"Paul Werner’s Museum, Inc: Inside the Global Art World is a rollicking little screed that takes aim at Krens and the Guggenheim... Werner has a good eye for the smoke-and-mirrors of the marketing people and what it often serves to hide, which is a synergy between art museums and corporate ambition that has little to do with art itself." - Jed Perl, The Atlantic Magazine, October 2008.
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"Witty polemic." Valerie Steele, "Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion Exhibition" Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Berg Publishers, Volume 12, Number 1, March 2008 , pp. 7-30 (24).
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"Great little incendiary volume picking apart the recent corporate approach of the Guggenheim Museum and other world-class art institutions like it. Written by a former high-level employee/board member, [sic] it sheds very interesting light on the counterintuitive way that museums have taken to operating, becoming corporations that need to make money rather than cultural institutions. His breakdown of recent specific exhibitions that have been engineered in terms of bringing people through the doors rather than provoking thought or furthering scholarship is particularly enlightening. " - "Shawn," Goodreads.
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"Very forthright." - Interview, Radio National, Australia. [Listen or Download].
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"If you have been following the 'Krens Effect' of the reputed world domination scheme of the Guggenheim Museum, then this acerbic little rant against Krens and museum capitalism will be sure to entertain. I learned a lot about the institutional art market, and though I disagree with a lot of what Werner writes [...], it is a brave (long) essay nonetheless." - Gong Szeto.
"Werner puts out some compelling arguments, so it's a complicated subject on why and how art is consumed and the role of the institution in all this consumption." - Gong Szeto.
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"I just finished reading--or, I should say, inhaling--your MUSEUM, INC. I was so thrilled to find in you an essayist of such wit, insight, breadth of background, and nerve that I had to write to offer you my highest compliments. [...] It is difficult to find good, can't-put-it-down writing in our field." - Alison Pearlman, critic, ex-museum worker.
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"есть замечательная книжка на эту тему.
просто must-read.. чертовски злая и тем дважды захватывающая.
называется museum inc by Paul Werner
вот даже сайт есть.
только я не влезал в него. не знаю, что там."
[Simply a must-read . .Devilishly mean and for that reason doubly engaging.bad_girls_do_it, 2007-06-23.
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"Please. I have read Museum, Inc. — and Minima Moralia, for that matter — you know." Colin Brayton.
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"My gosh, I could talk for another two hours with this person!...Definitely a must-buy." Liz Pieries, Monday Morning After, Radio CKUT, 90.3 FM, Montreal.[Download].
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"A harsh but interesting take on the Krens effect. [Recommended Reading]" Art World Salon.
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"A must read. First of all, this book is funny. The stream of consciousness, thinking aloud style of Paul Werner is terribly amusing and extremely entertaining which puts it in a class of its own....Anybody who thinks something is amiss in the art world must read it." "La Chichimeca," Amazon.com, February 11, 2007.
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"Mr [sic] Werner [...] is sharp, cynical, searing, passionate and occasionally world-weary by turns.
[...]
Even if you disagree with Mr Werner's arguments, and a lot of people will, there are some spot-on swipes in among the verbal fireworks.[...] Is it balanced, is it fair, is it conciliatory? No, it's not. It is rude, overwrought and occasionally over-written - and all the better for it." Jane Morris, The Art Newspaper, January 2007
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"At the other extreme, the capitalist involution of art is announced with cheerful rage in Paul Werner’s Museum, Inc: Inside the Global Art World (2005), in which he parses the proposition that art behaves like money because money behaves like art. This is the capital of the America Werner dubs 'the Living Museum of Wild Capitalism'. Or perhaps that’s Out West." Ian Wedde, New Zealand Listener, December 28-29, 2006.
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"Rather than stress the approach to museums as the sites of the age-old class struggle, I opt for the approach that sees in the museums the embodiments of the basic categories of perception that as social categories of classification bear structurally homologous relation to the system of vision and division that organizes society at large." Pablo Markin, September 7, 2006.
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"Much ink has been wasted on lampooning artists, but if you want the real George Grosz scene, turn over the rock on the wealthy collectors and donors and the museum directors, their quasi employees. Paul Werner uncovers this aspect of the international art world in his new nonfiction book." Theresa L. Duncan, The Wit of the Staircase, May 17, 2006.
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"Cynical and delicious exposé of Thomas Krens’ 'Guggenheim brand.'" Paula Rabinowitz, Against the Current, March/April 2006.
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"Werner's writing style 'is unruly,' says Ida Applebroog; 'he has no restraints, and that's the part I love." - "Eye-openers: Experts list some of the best recent publications." Art News, November 2006.
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"Punchy little book." Dushko Petrovich, Boston Globe.
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"I read the few chapters in the beginning, but the author wrote in a very conversation or joking style, it seems hard for me to grasp at times what he is really talking about. [...] But when the media is all positive to projects like Bilbao (or Echigo-Trumari locally everywhere now), how could you got yr skeptical message of them across anyhow?" mini-Museum von Kaspar, Hong Kong.
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"WAY TO GO....You are the classic example of what I wanted the film to accomplish." Teri Horton, subject of the documentary Who the @#$% is Jackson Pollock?
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"This insider, Paul Werner, has a rapier wit and knows just how to use it." Art Slob.
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"Хотя книжка (точнее, маленькая книжечка) сильно нравится." Рынок современного искусства. Доверяя вкусам, а не цифрам.
All the same, I like the book - or rather, booklet.
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"Short version: Museum Inc. is a wicked cool book.
[...]
Second off, I'm extremely happy to see that there actually are people who not only have read Benjamin, Diderot, Hegel, Locke, Marx, Rousseau, Schiller, Adam Smith, and some guy named Johann Joachim Winckelmann, but actually find some use for it in real life.
[...]
Third off, while I'm not entirely certain I buy into absolutely everything Paul Werner is selling, nonetheless I immediately glommed into what he was on to, and I'm fairly certain that he is on to something.
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Personally, I wouldn't wanna be his girlfriend with him being that cynical - even my sweetie gives me wide berth when I start ranting and raving.
But Mr. Werner is much more literate and humongously more witty than I am, so reading what he writes is frequently giggle inducing, and sometimes (if I remember correctly three times) actually causes full on belly laughs." Zeke's Book Review, Montreal.
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"[Werner's] little screed is relentlessly brilliant, hilarious, dead-on and hyperwitty.
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[He] extrapolates way beyond Krens [...] to all sorts of searing insights about today's big-time art world, its unholy mixture of funny money, fake egalitarianism, and backroom investment schemes.
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Tucked in with all the rhetorical acrobatics, however, is a canny, erudite analysis of the high-art market from the Enlightenment to now.
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[H]e's so full of beans [...] it would be unsafe to leave him alone in a room with a sacred cow. If you liked Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word, [...] imagine it with a shot of Guy Debord, a twist of Walter Benjamin." Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer.
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"Rather than a history of the Guggenheim Museum, we get a crash course in symbolic capital, exchange value, and other Marxist slogans. In place of a Krens backstory, we learn about the 'Apologist for the Depraved Playthings of Tyranny and Their Sniveling Lackeys.' Instead of an eye-witness account, we read, "As the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu suggested. . . As Walter Benjamin put it . . . As Guy Debord put it . . . [...] No, the museum world won't be saved by the Age of Werner. It will survive, thanks to bankers like Morgan, tycoons like Frick, and directors like de Montebello." James Panero, The New Criterion, April, 2006. [My response can be found here ; Panero's response to my response is here; my response to Panero's...aw, forget it.]
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"Under Museum, Inc.'s sparkle lies a wearisome cynicism [...] as Werner continually collapses cultural ideals into power relations.[...] Culture was promoted by business and politics, but it was also set against them; it promised a degree of satisfaction and value that they could not. Which means that [...] art will never be completely for sale." Josie Appleton, Times Literary Supplement, April 14, 2006. Note: Cynicism is a philosophical movement founded by Antisthenes, a follower of Socrates. Antisthenes liked to dress like a working-class person and associate with the working classes instead of the elite. When he taught, he spoke so that everyone could understand him. He opposed religion, private property, government, and slavery.
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"A most interesting insider's tell-all. Not a how-to-resource, but eye-opening exposé." M. A. J., College instructor.
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"It's truly enviable to write like this - and indeed envy, along with all the other Seven Deadly Sins (pride, anger, greed, lust, gluttony, and sloth) are accounted for in this tidy exposé" Beth Gersh-Nešic, New York Arts Exchange.
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"A pamphlet should possess a quiet strength, persuading by the coruscating force of its logic." Brian Sholis, In search of the miraculous.
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"The reader's attention never manages to stay away from the mechanisms of lust and desire that are unconsciously or not instilled in this book." Jean-Paul Martinon, EnterText.
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"Paul Werner's new book, Museum, Inc.: Inside the Global Art World, is going to make some people at the Guggenheim very unhappy." Todd Gibson, From the Floor.
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"Now there is a book - perhaps the book on the topic to date." High-Low-Between.
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"Most of the critical literature on museums [is] written by Marxists...[Paul Werner] explains in clear language why he hates present-day museums..
[...]
The ultimate function of art writing [...] is to support these institutions[..] And the function of the gallery system is to create commodities." David Carrier, "Art World, Mart World,"
ArtUS no. 13, 26-7 May/June 2006.
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"While your sharp review of this convoluted world of art, floating in an undefined galaxy, reinforces my views, it is also a great blow to my ideals and hopes. Glad I read it and dammed that I did." V. C., Canada (artist).
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