In October 1997 the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao opened in Bilbao to a blaze of fireworks and publicity. The fireworks died down but the publicity has persisted and, from its very first day, visitors have continued to pour in, in unforeseen numbers. Almost on its own, the Museo has radically changed the image of the city, modified the regional economy, and opened up important debates about Basque identity and the place of art within it. These debates show no signs of dying down. The local effects of the Museo have been so wide-ranging and, to a great extent, so unexpected that the people of Bilbao are still accommodating themselves to the transformations it has initiated. Globally, the Museo's triumph has been so widely acknowledged and so broadly advertised that a variety of city authorities in America, Europe and Asia have considered imitating the Basque initiative.

In this chapter, I examine this, the world's first franchise art museum. I choose the Museo as my topic of study because it is a revolutionary type of art museum, because it has been such a great international success since its opening, because it has generated broad, prolonged polemic (especially about its effects on Basque identity), and because it threatens to become a model for future museums around the world.