"Between 1998 and 2001, expenditure on creative-industry construction projects — theaters, museums, performing arts centers — quadrupled, from a little over $400 million per year to almost $1.8 billion," writes Felix Salmon. He goes on to explain why arts organizations love new, flash buildings. It's because fundraising for new facilities is easier than fundraising for anything else:
Buildings have names slapped on them, and you can see the money in a way that you can’t if you’re spending on things like curatorial staff or acquisitions or touring budgets or insurance. Most other forms of arts spending feel ephemeral, in a way that putting up some huge edifice doesn’t. Even if the money spent on that edifice would much better serve the mission of the institution in some other way.(Image: A rendering for the building that will replace the Cooper Union engineering facility, via Gothamist.)