Asked to think about what defines a museum, and most people will point to the institution’s collection or, in some cases, its location. Increasingly, however, what defines an art museum is its brand and the associated messaging—particularly in crowded museum environments like New York City, where institutions have to distinguish themselves to attract members. Consequently, a growing number of museums in and outside of the U.S. now pay a great deal of attention to developing a brand. Consider the Studio Museum in Harlem, which last year inaugurated a new ‘graphic identity’ to herald its long-anticipated reopening. More recently, the Guggenheim appointed its first chief brand officer, Tina Vaz, who told Observer that the museum’s branding is less about what is on display and more about the idea that “we were founded as a museum of the future, so that is very much part of our DNA.”
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This futurism starts with the architecture. There’s the eye-catching and curvaceous Frank Lloyd Wright building in Manhattan and its Frank Gehry-designed outposts in Bilbao, Spain and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (expected to open sometime next year). The New York City building opened in 1959 on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and “began our engagement with architecture, which is also........