| A museum is a historically situated institution invested with cultural significance. Taking a case-study approach, this thesis demonstrates the usefulness of certain strands of critical museum studies for sifting through discourses to understand what is at stake in a particular museum at a given time. The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art opened in Charlotte, North Carolina in January 2010, a moment when extravagant museum architecture was expected to serve as brand or icon to increase the prestige of a city. Mario Botta’s design for the Bechtler Museum, however, harkens to an earlier, subtler mode. Likewise, the museum’s single-donor collection of predominantly European, mid-twentieth-century art reinforces a modernist mode of interaction between audience, artist, and patron. This study examines the architecture and discourse of the Bechtler, revealing its operative fictions to be iterations of two well-known museological mythologies: the “vision of the collector” and the “vision of the architect.”... |
