Art
Peter's Principles
Riding the cycles of boom and bust, Peter Marzio has turned the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston into a great cultural—and business—success.
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Marzio's years in the academic trenches gave him a unique perspective when he first visited Houston, in 1982. Mulling over a job offer from the MFAH, Marzio, then the director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., suddenly realized that Houston was a latter-day version of a growth model familiar to students of the American frontier: the instant city. "The businessmen responsible for so much of the growth of America were community builders, not men who ran corporations," Marzio explains. "In modern terms you might call them developers. They believed that in order for their investment to pay off, they had to create what they called 'instant cities.' They'd map out a tract of land in the wilderness and give it street names, and they'd have a building they called the theater, and on and on. There were often cities ahead of the pioneers. And that kind of incongruity, the image of urbanism in the frontier, was for me the distinguishing characteristic of Houston in the eighties.
"It first came to me," Marzio says, "when I was walking along and would see a modern skyscraper—downtown was like a new-car lot, each building by another famous architect, each building more beautiful than the one before—and then the next block had no sidewalk. That incongruity, which most people make fun of, to me symbolized vitality. And that's the part of it I still love."
Houston's unfinished, "instant city" character, exacerbated by its absence of zoning, may explain why outsiders so often find its glass half empty and why they are inclined to view the Menil Collection or Houston Grand Opera as preposterous anomalies—Louis XV commodes in a frontier saloon—rather than as evidence of a glass half filled with surprising cultural riches. But why can't a city founded by a couple of hucksters and so recently plagued by their corporate descendants promote its legitimate cultural wealth? The solution to that enigma, Marzio suggests, is also rooted deep in the city's economic history. "Houston is a wholesale city, not a retail city," he says. "Look at the three major economic forces—upstream oil, agriculture, and the port. When you're a wholesale industry, you never speak to a consumer. You only sell your goods and services to another company or another country. You don't need television or newspapers or mass-broadcast communications to survive. As a result you do not have an important public relations or advertising company in the fourth-largest city in America. What that really means is that publicly the city is inarticulate. That doesn't mean it's stupid, just inarticulate."
The message is further garbled, Marzio suggests, by a civic identity crisis. Culturally, Houston may be closer to New Orleans than to Fort Worth. It is, after all, a steamy Southern seaport with a gumbo-thick mélange of black, Cajun, redneck, white Protestant, blue-collar, Asian, and Hispanic culture—not to mention a substantial transient and resident international community that increasingly figures in the city's cultural profile (just as it does in New York's). Nevertheless, the city continues to ride the mechanical bull of Western wannabe-ism, oblivious to the oxymoronic irony behind the original urban cowboy. "Why Houston persists in using the cowboy imagery for a city that was never a cowtown is beyond me," says Marzio, who researched the trail-drive era while working on Boorstin's book. "Fort Worth I can understand. But it was never true in Houston. If you look at the earliest parades for the Fat Stock Show, before they called it the rodeo, you had Hollywood people leading the parade. Gene Autry!" That Houston confuses Hollywood myth with its own history isn't surprising, Marzio adds: "There isn't a single first-rate history of the city of Houston. For a city like Chicago, which was born at almost the same time [Houston was founded in 1836, Chicago a year later], there must be three hundred good histories."
Marzio's vision of Houston's still-evolving cultural identity emphasizes modernity and diversity. He sees the future MFAH as being in the tradition of the great "encyclopedic" collections like New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Art Institute of Chicago but with a dramatically different orientation. While America's most venerable collections are based on vast caches of antiquities unearthed by American archaeologists at the end of the nineteenth century, Marzio proposes a narrative focused on the far end of the timeline, from Picasso to the present day. (He expects that most of the bequests attracted by his next new building will be twentieth-century art, half a billion dollars' worth from collectors outside Texas alone.) And, he says, he would tell "a much broader story of creativity in the twentieth century" than the standard modern-art-museum model, mixing the familiar American and European pantheon with a fresh look at African American, Latin American, Asian, and Texas and Southwestern artists. "What turns me on," he says, "is an encyclopedic context where cultures rub up against one another."
But Marzio's own empire-building has taught him the virtue most important, paradoxically, for an instant city: patience. "The city has such a long way to go," he says. "Just trying to make this museum better and better is a slow, painful, and expensive process. And it's not just success after success. It's about failure along the way. I don't think the city is going to be finished in this century." On the other hand, Marzio ticks off a litany of tools that will enable Houston eventually to get the job done: a strong work ethic, a gift for the practical application of scientific and technological innovation, and an independent, open, "soaring" spirit. Surprisingly, sheer wealth isn't on the list. "Compared with New York or Chicago or Los Angeles," he says, "we don't have two dollars."
Dr. Marzio's final prescription for his neurotic metropolis? That it should get over "this self-consciousness about being 'world class,'" he says. "It's such a tired cliché. I don't even know what that means anymore. What's wrong with being very good?" In the lexicon of insecurity spoken by all Texas cities, "world class" and its companion catchphrase "international city" are artifacts of an era of cultural colonialism in which the "provinces" aspired to ape the style and standards of the world capitals, principally New York. But, as Marzio suggests, the terminology is now meaningless. Houston will never be the New York of the twenty-first century—and neither will New York, simply because the capital-provinces model has succumbed to today's extraordinary mobility of people, art, ideas, and information. In our peripatetic global culture, sopranos and sculptors now circulate freely through a network of hot destinations ranging from venerable dowagers like London to brash upstarts like—dare we say it?—Houston. A new map of world culture is taking shape, and Houston, the inarticulate instant city still fretting to fill in its own plat, will someday discover that it is already on it.
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