It's time for museums to desist with the silly spectacles and get back to the good work they could be doing in the civic sphere.

In one sense, spectacle shows represent acute risk aversion on the part of museums. It's cousin to the disease that has sacked Hollywood, where only remakes and sequels promise the margins that justify a global blockbuster production—so only remakes and sequels get greenlighted.

Kraftwerk performs at the Tate Modern in London in February 2013 following the group's "retrospective" at the Museum of Modern Art in 2012.
Kraftwerk performs at the Tate Modern in London in February 2013 following the group's "retrospective" at the Museum of Modern Art in 2012.

When museums chase blockbusters, viewers lose out, because the artists who can deliver at the scale of architecture are few in number, especially as the scale grows. It's a problem that Hal Foster fingered in his book, The Art-Architecture Complex, a survey of the global convergence of art and architecture in the narrow hands of a few elite practitioners. The fault extends beyond the walls of any single institution, but again, these expectations harm the smallest ones most.

If museums insist on commissioning artists to work at the glib scale of starchitecture, then it's time to start thinking of museums as malign developers.