Two stories about cultural destinations this week that are superficially about geography but are actually about who culture is being built for. The Atlantic profiles Fulvio De Bonis, a Rome tourism fixer who will get you the Colosseum to yourself and access to privately held Caravaggios. Simultaneously, Australia's Museum of Old and New Art has announced a Bangkok branch, to be reached by cross-river cable car. Both stories are about the same underlying dynamic: cultural access is being repackaged as luxury product, and the cable car or the private tour is increasingly the only difference between the experience and the crowd.
MONA's Model and the Institutional Export
MONA is one of the few genuinely eccentric institutional exports in contemporary museum culture. David Walsh's original Hobart museum built its identity on difficulty, its architecture is underground and deliberately disorienting, its collection is confrontational and refuses curatorial comfort. Exporting that to Bangkok is either an act of cultural confidence or a category error. The cable car delivery mechanism is either brilliant placemaking or a theme park tell. Probably both. The BlackStar Film Festival's 15-year retrospective in Philadelphia, celebrating cinema from the global majority made for liberation rather than prestige, sits in direct contrast: a cultural institution that has built its entire identity around refusing the export-luxury model. Both are viable. Only one of them is honest about what it's optimizing for.
Access, Architecture, and the Price of Wonder
The Atlantic's De Bonis profile is ultimately a piece about what happens when the friction of access becomes a product. Mass tourism has made Rome's canonical sites almost unusable for genuine contemplation. The fixers who sell you the uncrowded version are not creating access. They are monetizing scarcity that mass tourism created. MONA Bangkok will do something similar with geographic novelty. A 2024 paper in the Journal of Heritage Tourism by Timothy and Boyd found that elite heritage access experiences consistently produce visitor satisfaction scores that have more to do with exclusivity signaling than with deeper engagement with the cultural object itself. The Raphael show at the Met is post-pandemic proof that blockbusters still work. But the question of who culture is being built for, and what kind of building that requires, is getting harder to avoid. Max Hollein has argued for open access as a civic obligation. The cable car to MONA Bangkok is a different answer to the same question.