Washington’s Hirshhorn Museum has been proposing an addition by artist Douglas Aitken. The “work” would do double duty as art and a bookstore which has some tongues clucking across the internet. Here’s the LA Times‘s Christopher Knight:

The precedent is unmentioned in the Washington Post story, but that’s the year the little Hudson River Museum commissioned artist Red Grooms to design its bookstore as a collection purchase. The project was even partly paid for with an acquisitions grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Who came up with the Yonkers idea? Former Hudson River Museum director (and former Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles director) Richard Koshalek. Today, Koshalek is director of, yes, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

The scheme was cheeky 30 years ago, back when contemporary art was a hard sell for most museums and facilities fundraising was a stretch. Today? Not so much.

Old Dog, Not-So-New Tricks (Culture Monster)