Museums that wish to engage with contemporary artists must therefore constantly seek to create spaces that can support rapidly changing notions of art. It appears then that Serra is the reinventor, that large-scale works such as his mammoth Intersection II are dictating architectural expansion. By using space as a medium, though, art since Minimalism is often created to contaminate this space, to resist ontological reconfiguration by breaking out of the self-enclosed frame of much modern art into the room, the hall, the space that is the museum. By sometimes overwhelming this space and forcing viewers to bodily experience the work-environment, many works enjoy a sense of liberation, albeit a false one. And this logic, whereby liberation is met by domination, is the logic of late capitalism, what Ernst Mandel has named our current, all- pervasive economic phase.
Late capitalism colonizes every last vestige of traditional, non-commodified space.
And the Western corporate museum is first and foremost an agent of late capitalism, functioning according to its logic. What is reinventing the museum, then, is not Terrence Riley or the MoMA trustees, nor is it Serra and his gargantuan works, but rather the logic of late capitalism just as it does every other Western institution, moving them according to its ever-changing needs. Economic forces, then, prompt art and architecture to vie for power. Within the museum this logic motivates architecture to adjust itself to artistic subversion, colonizing, containing, and disciplining it to conform to its first-world outlook. If the colonization of space as dictated by late capitalism is recognized as a historical inevitability, and if it is historicized, then maybe museum expansion might be seen not as an opportunity to show more works simultaneously and more appropriately, but as endangering artistic freedom of speech.