Mass MoCA, the World’s Biggest Contemporary Art Museum, Looks Fantastic

One of the fascinating phenomena in the American art world is our flexibility in establishing new museums. In calcified, stratified Europe, building a new museum from scratch is counterintuitive. Doing anything new is hard. Though this is changing, great European private collections are usually sold at estate sales. The grand philanthropic gesture — giving a collection to a museum or starting one — is rare.

In America, it happens more often, in part because of our tax laws but mostly because Americans are naturally generous. Almost everything in the arts here happens through private initiative, and it takes plenty of initiative, even chutzpah, to form a museum from scratch.