Meanwhile museums extend, too, into global empires . Sometimes, galleries create alternatives in another sense, a space between art as commerce and art as something more. With Dumbo or Wiliamsburg in Brooklyn , say, or SoFa in San Jose, a divide between unheralded studios and borderline galleries hardly exists. In SoHo now, a distinction between art and upscale home design gets fuzzier still. Call it furniture's revenge, long after it first got hard to tell art from the wall fixtures.
Museums juggle their own confusing alternatives.
Somehow, the Met must attract larger and larger crowds while upholding its elite image. Somehow, it must grasp hold of and preserve this undefinable thing called tradition while documenting departures. With flamboyant new wings and branches abroad, museums have become more like competing empires than some art world. Just to speak of an art world is to fall guilty of an idealization. I no longer know for sure.