A still from the Guggenheim's recent acquistion, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait.
Shocking news - or only to be expected? The Guggenheim announces that among its top ten acquisitions of 2006 is a controversial film, controversial not because of its form or content but because it is quite possibly the most pre-seen movie any art museum has ever purchased. Douglas Gordon and Phillipe Parreno's Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait is a mesmerising homage to the grizzled football star made using 17 cameras trained entirely on the player during a match between Real Madrid and Villareal. The film was shown in cinemas around the world last year. The DVD has had excellent sales. Even the official website gives you almost five minutes for nothing.
So why spend precious funds on buying the "installation portrait" - the art version, as it were, which involves projecting the film on two sides of a screen? Partly, of course, because dualism is Gordon's speciality as a Turner Prize-winning artist, partly because you can't just buy the DVD and stick it on continuous loop, now can you? And partly, of course, because nothing will draw the crowds like Zidane in ravishing slow-mo.
But scan the acquisition list of US museums last year, and you'll find little save populism and nail-biting caution. Video, a dominant form for so long you would think museums would be hot on the trail of the newly original, is represented by past masters like Bill Viola and Matthew Barney. The French trickster Pierre Huyghe has done a lot of business in America, it is true, but he is a bankable hit having had major shows all over Europe including last year's retrospective at Tate Modern. And wonderful as it is to see that MOMA is at last buying a work by the great South African animator William Kentridge, it would have to be his 7 Fragments for George Méliès, somewhere between a self-portrait and a love-song to the pioneering French filmmaker, rather than the brilliantly mordant satires on African politics for which Kentridge is rightly known.
Nobody is buying any video artists who haven't already been thoroughly, certifiably, museumised and it is the same with photography. Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Bill Brandt, William Eggleston - this is roughly the equivalent, in terms of photography, of our National Gallery buying a Rubens or a Rembrandt.
If you feel patriotic, which I don't, then you may be pleased to see the YBA generation continuing to conquer America. Kansas gets Hirst. Buffalo gets Rachel Whiteread and Mona Hatoum. Poor San Francisco gets the awful Sam Taylor-Wood, and so on. But America always stays true to itself in the end. The Met is still buying Jackson Pollocks and for the third year running Jasper Johns is the most-purchased of all artists - and the most expensive order on what has long since become the set menu of US museums.
