In a site-specific exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pablo Bronstein explores hypothetical architectural scenarios for the institution. Befitting a building that has expanded twenty-fold through a range of diversely styled campaigns since the 1870s, Bronstein's drawings are rendered in a range of styles, with a clear influence from the eighteenth century, when the very institution of the museum was born. In the drawing, Masterplan Circa 1920 (above), Bronstein imagines an eastwardly expanding Met with gardened rooftops; the lower of the two pencil marks on the left denotes Madison Avenue. Bronstein's show -- and practice in general -- call to mind the interests of Kynaston McShine's landmark 1999 exhibition, "Museum as Muse" at the Museum of Modern Art; among the Andrea Frasers, Louise Lawlers, Thomas Struths, and so forth, McShine included Hubert Robert's Imaginary View of the Grand Gallery in the Louvre in Ruins, a powerfully destructive instance of "institutional critique" at the very moment of that institution's origin.
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