13 Read the following text. The Museum Wars

Europe's great art institutions are racing to transform themselves into modern centers of entertainment.

Cool, cerebral and formidably focused, Mark Jones hides his erudition beneath an easy affability. In his six years as director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, he has overseen the transformation of a venerable if quaintly eclectic institution into one of Britain's most dynamic and ambitious museums that is rarely out of the headlines. Recent headlines have not always been friendly: the V&A has come under sneering attack over its Kylie Minogue exhibition, and Jones has been accused of pandering to pop culture. Unruffled, he insisted that the V&A, like all museums, must broaden its views and its range of visitors.

At the Prado museum in Madrid visitors can peer into the past in a new exhibit of 19th-century photographs, which show artworks crammed on the walls wherever they would fit. Lithographs, paintings and plans chart the higgledy-piggledy development of one of Europe's best-loved art-treasure troves. Similarly, London's British Museum opened a new Enlightenment Gallery this year to celebrate the historic role of museums as centers of learning, displaying among other things intricate catalogs of 17th-century botanical specimens.

While such exhibits enshrine the past, ambitious new plans for the future are transforming the dusty halls of some of Europe's most revered galleries. In Germany, Spain, Italy and Britain, museums are scrambling to create bigger, more-dazzling exhibition spaces, smart new restaurants and shops, study centers and inviting public areas. The push reflects a shift in how the public regards its artistic institutions. "People want more than the old-style museum," says John Lewis, chairman of the Wal­lace Collection, a gallery of 17th- and 18th - century paintings, porcelain and furniture in London. "We are driven to become more an arm of the entertainment and education industries rather than the academic institutions we used to be." Throughout Europe, the race is on. With demand for culture increasingly driving tourist dollars, "cities are trying to compete for them," says research analyst Richard Cope.

Madrid is hoping the $226 million refurbishment of the site that contains the Prado, the Reina Sofia modern-art museum and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, will raise its cultural profile to match that of London. New galleries will increase the museum's current exhibition space to more than 160,000 square meters—not including the 13,000 square meters for cafes, restaurants, theaters and offices, all linked by tree-lined paths.

No European museum expansion is more ambitious than Berlin's restoration of Museum Island, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the city center. The $2.1 billion project slated for completion in 2015 aims to turn the island into the largest art complex in Europe, covering all the major cultures in six museums filling 88,000 square meters. The Alte Nationalgalerie, an ornate classical temple built in 1866, reopened two years ago, displaying 19th-century artists, including German Romantics. Ren­ovation of the neighboring Bode Museum, with its collection of Medieval and Renais­sance art, is well underway, and the Neues Museum is being rebuilt to house Egyptian and prehistoric works. There are even plans to reconstruct the neighboring Hohen-zollern Palace to showcase Berlin's extensive collection of non-European art. And British architect David Chipperfield has been commissioned to create a striking new entrance to the whole complex.

These institutions are hoping to repeat the triumph of London's Tate Museum, which spent $243 million to convert a disused power station into a gallery of modern art. When the Tate Modern opened in 2U00, director Sir Nicholas Serota de­scribed its creation as part of a "sea change" in culture, with visual arts becoming the most popular creative medium. His remark has proved amazingly prescient: in 2002, the top two attractions among foreign tourists to London were the Tate Modern and the refurbished British Museum. A year after the Tate Modern opened, its impact on the local economy was estimated at nearly $200 million—far higher than the $42 mil­lion the McKinsey consulting firm first estimated the museum would contribute when it developed the business plan in 1996.

Smaller galleries, too, are hoping to cash in. Italian Culture Minister Giuliano Urbani plans to transform Florence's charming Uffizi Gallery into a world-class cultural destination. The original horseshoe-shaped building, created in 1560, will be restruc­tured to increase its exhibit space from 6,000 to 13,000 square meters. The $72 million expansion will enable curators to show 800 works now in storage. When completed the "nuovo Uffizi" will accommodate 7,000 visitors daily, near­ly double its current capacity. "We will sur­pass even the Louvre," predicts Urbani.

Some purists oppose the idea of turning museums into glitzy consumer complexes. "My reservation is whether we lose that calm and that moment of reflection, that sense of civic space," says Tristram Hunt, a museum curator.

Still, the trend seems irreversible: London's Victoria and Albert Museum now regularly stays open until 10 p.m., offering a cash bar and live music. The opening crowd for Kylie, Mark Jones of the V&A admits, was different from that for Van Gogh. But museums should be fun as well as instructive: "I want to show beautiful things beautifully so that people can enjoy them. I'm bored with the idea that people should only go to a museum to be better educated. Why shouldn't they go for pure pleasure?"

The debate over the role of the modern museum will no doubt go on. Only now it will be conducted in state-of-the-art lecture halls and over perfectly frothed cappuccinos.

NEWSWEEK, STEFAN, August, 2007