NPR has curated a list of noteworthy-quotes from Michael Lewis, an art history professor at Williams College, who's interviewed in the recent issue of Commentary Magazine.

Never before has art sold better or museums drawn larger crowds. Yet, according to Lewis at least, most Americans have become "indifferent" to art.

Lewis isn't the first to note that today's spectacular museums serve as a façade that hides a pitiful situation in contemporary art. The contemporary artist and pioneer of institutional critique, Andrea Fraser, made a video in 2001 that touched on exactly this issue.

Entitled, Little Frank and His Carp, the work (posted below; warning, vaguely NSFW) features Fraser as she tours the lobby of the newly-opened Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. As Fraser listens to the audio guide describe the architecture in gushing, ecstatic terms, the artist herself verges on a near-sexual experience.

In a 2005 interview, excerpted on UbuWeb, Fraser explains, "What struck me about the audio tour for the Guggenheim Bilbao was the explicitness of the seduction....The audio guide promises transcendence of the social through a transgression: the always forbidden touching of art—or here, architecture-as-art…. The tour distances the museum from the difficulties of “modern art,” claiming that the building’s sensual appeal 'has nothing to do with age or class or education.' Freed of social/symbolic restrictions, we can make ourselves at home in the sensual, caring arms of the (mother) museum."

Recently on Archinect, Amelia Taylor-Hochberg delved into some of these issues in her review of the pre-opening viewing event of Diller Scofidio + Renfro's new (and then-empty) Broad Museum in Los Angeles. In the article, entitled "What makes an artless museum?," Hochberg wonders, "Is the building I’m touring now a piece of art that I’m meant to appreciate and study? How do I do that? Can my kids run around?"