SFMOMA Strikes Out

How sad that the SFMOMA was unable to land the thousand-piece, billion-dollar Fisher collection, which instead will be set up sui generis in the Presidio, where the bowling alley now flourishes.
The whole redemptive idea of a new SFMOMA was that some day the local nouveaux collectors would pile up their riches and salvage the museum's pathetic permanent collection, which does not have a single iconic Destination Work.

What it does have, besides a room full of Clyfford Still and another of Paul Klee and a couple of "design," is a monstrous, unshowable Sam Francis, an unsigned & undated Barnett Newman, a Magritte that his dealer returned and was never offered for sale again in the artist's lifetime, etc.

It was hoped, way back when, that there would soon be major gifts—entire collections—from the Andersons, the Bowes, the Logans...and Don and Doris Fisher (of the Gap). But collectors are fickle egomaniacs, among other things...
I wonder what kind of architectural statement the Fishers will be allowed to make within the bowling alley's footprint. Something in keeping with the prevailing neo-Spanish Boring Colonial? Something as banal as the George Lucas Complex?

Meanwhile, there is only one other bowling alley in The City, in the Yerba Buena Center; the Presidio's, so it is now promised, will be relocated. Better it should be declared a Historical Monument and the Fishers enjoined to do the right thing, but be grateful for small favors.

The real question, of course, is whether the Fisher collection has institutional quality, like the Frick, the Barnes, the Hirshhorn, the Phillips, the Mellon (the National Gallery)...or whether it will be merely a beau geste like the The Hess Collection (in Napa) or a dreadful provinciality like the di Rosa Preserve (also in Napa).

My sense, from the images released to the press, is that the Fishers bought a bunch of Names, never quite at an iconic moment.