Teamlab Tokyo is building a museum for digital art – culture in Hamburg

One could take the opportunity that it was announced on Tuesday that the Tokyo-based Teamlab group would be their third Museum in Hamburg open up, ask again whether this is art at all. With their exhibitions in the past twenty years and most recently in the museums in Tokyo and Shanghai, Teamlab has approached this question from exactly the opposite direction than, for example, Joseph Beuys or Marcel Duchamp. Because they embrace people’s viewing and experience habits with lots of cheers instead of challenging them. So – is it an art to put people in cascades of laser beams, colored light, electronic melodies and all sorts of electronic nonsense? It is called “Immersive Art”, haunting art that is installed with a lot of effort, especially in America and Asia.

The guardians of the canon have not yet made up their minds. There are only a few geniuses in the genre, mainly groups. Around 700 artists, programmers and architects belong to the collective in Tokyo. But because with this form of art there is of course a lot of rubbish that belongs more to the fair than to the museum, the hesitation is still very clear at the moment.

In Hamburg, Teamlab’s Digital Art Museum is to open in the Hafencity in 2024. Lars Hinrichs is behind it, the founder of the social network Xing. The Hamburg Museum will have more than 7,000 square meters, almost as much as the 10,000 in the first museum on an artificial island in Tokyo Bay. This will make it the largest museum for digital art in Europe. The Berlin architecture firm Heide & von Beckerath is to design the building. The permanent exhibition is based on the “Borderless” installation in Tokyo.

It doesn’t really matter whether it’s art or not

And to answer the initial question at least journalistically: It doesn’t really matter whether it’s art or not. In any case, in Tokyo in the summer of 2018 it was great fun for – yes – the whole family. It was obviously shared by all the other visitors who were drifting through the halls, in which the colors and lights streamed, sparkled, glistened, blinked, surrounded them all around, reacted to them.

Teamlab delivers something like the ornamentation of digitization. And with all due respect, in view of the really consistently unsuccessful pixel sauce that is being sold as the art of artificial intelligence, or that whole late psychedelic nineties aesthetic that the new platforms are selling as NFT works, what Teamlab staged there in Tokyo is, after all very overwhelming in all its beauty and splendor. The audience has already made up their minds.

After the Teamlab Museum opened in Tokyo, it only took one season for it to be the most successful monothematic museum in the world. 2.3 million visitors came in one year, more than the most successful to date, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. In Hamburg they calculate with 700,000 visitors in the first year. Teamlab is more in the tradition of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Jeff Koons or the Cirque de Soleil. It’s spectacle and city marketing. But they really like that in Hamburg.