I have started thinking of them as spaceships to nowhere. In my city, another one is always on the way; the latest touches down at 213 Bowery this fall. The last to arrive at that address, the SANAA-designed New Museum, was finished in 2007, the year of Obamamania and the iPhone and the first gentle rustling of the Great Recession. Like its predecessor, the new annex is a sleek, politely glowy object. It disrupts the skyline but not too much, making a statement but not too loudly. Designed by Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu, it took three years to build, doubles the original floorspace, and cost something like sixty million dollars, or what Manhattan developers now call a “bargain.” The style is the kind still optimistically described as futuristic, though the reopening of a new New in 2025 is a reminder that this future is close to twenty years old, a throwback to a time when smart design and calm authority were still widely believed to be capable of saving the world. The first exhibition on the calendar is titled, too perfectly, “Memories of the Future.” The timing is always strange with these things. 2025 has been a terrible year for most American museums, the year rivers of cash went dry: millions lost for the Clyfford Still, the Berkeley, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and dozens of others, because the National Endowment for the Arts would no longer provide them; and millions more in international tourism, because suddenly nobody wants to fly here and take a Nighthawks selfie. It was the year the National Endowment for the Humanities cut major funding to museums. This was also the year the White House went snarling after the Smithsonian, and when suited Beltway goons paid the National Gallery a visit to discuss its “legal status.” It was the year an executive order blasted the National Museum of African American History and Culture for encouraging its visitors to learn something about racism, and the year Trump squeezed out the National Portrait Gallery’s director for daring to think that diversity was on the whole not such a bad thing. It was the year hundreds gathered in Washington, D.C., to defend the Smithsonian, chanting, “Hands off our history,” though it was also the year protesters booed the Brooklyn Museum’s latest round of layoffs, and others crowded the lobby of the Whitney to condemn the cancellation of a pro-Palestinian performance, and others danced outside the Museum of Natural History to condemn board members who profit from oil. It was the year climate activists stayed in jail for throwing soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and the name “Warren Kanders” stayed in the Whitney lobby. Depending on who you talk to, in sum, 2025 was the year museums were the victims or the problem or part of the problem. What is beyond dispute is that 2025 was the year America’s big museums got bigger. Every year is. The New Museum; the Studio Museum, which reopens this fall in a new three-hundred-million-dollar package by Adjaye Associates and Cooper Robertson; the Frick Gallery, recalled to life after a two-hundred-million-dollar renovation by Selldorf Architects; the Met, seventy million dollars poorer but one twinkly Michael C. Rockefeller wing richer. 2025 is no anomaly. In 2015, the Whitney moved to a new four-hundred-million-dollar Renzo Piano building; in 2019, MoMA reopened after a years-long, block-darkening, four-hundred-fifty-million-dollar expansion, its third in as many decades. COVID paused the growth for a while but did nothing to challenge the trustees’ confidence that growth is good. The rest of the 2020s will add fifty thousand square feet of waterfront property to the Tampa Museum of Art (a little ominous, given the state of the Atlantic, but hopefully Florida knows what it’s doing), a hundred thousand square feet to the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, sixty thousand to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. Upward and outward they swell: palaces of art covered in endless pricy lifts and implants and transplants, not so different from the kind the sponsors lavish on their own bodies. If you want a clear x-ray of an era, every triumph and delusion crisply rendered, you can always study its art. In the case of the United States in 2025, however, it might be more revealing to study its art museums. Such anxious, blustery things! By the time a new renovation has hatched, a successor is already pecking through the shell. The final products slant and shift their weight as though aware that there is nothing final about them: not a chance in a society that relishes moving fast and breaking things, including itself. Is it ungrateful, in Trump Part II Year One, to be skeptical of the art museums that have managed to keep expanding, thanks to billionaire largesse? The American system of private cultural philanthropy has a lot to answer for, but at least it provides some cushion from POTUS 47’s whims. The better question might be: given the rain-or-shine ballooning of these buildings, and the municipal taxes that help make them possible, and the unaffordable restaurants, and the thirty-dollar tickets, and the shady land rights deals, and the write-offs, and the walls covered in donor names so that your eyes start to burn well before you reach the paintings, and the gift shops of deluxe crud, and the gentrifying neighborhoods that make the restaurants look affordable, and the galas — given all this, what, exactly, does museum expansion have to do with art? 
The concept of growth, I am not the only one to notice, is having a rough twenty-first century. Blame the housing bubble, the overextended American empire, the mallification of urban centers, the net worth of the plutocracy, the greenhouse gas emissions, or all of them, since they may be symptoms of the same sickness. At least among people without summer houses, growth is reckless, boorish, decadent, cancerous, inherently suspicious; growth is the needle tower that could wipe out homelessness but stays empty fifty-one weeks of the
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence