Article: The year's best art books New museums, old frescoes; Europe and Africa; Kapoor and Pollack; Degas, Bonnard, and Rothko

Art lovers didn't rack up as many frequent-flier miles to see shows this year as they did to check out new museum buildings. Everybody who could went to Richard Meier's Getty, in Los Angeles, and Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao, in Spain. The really with-it also made a pilgrimage to Helsinki, to see Kiasma, the dazzling new contemporary art museum by another American architect, Stephen Holl. All these peregrinations have made Victoria Newhouse's "Towards a New Museum" (Monacelli Press, $45) the most thumbed-over and valuable of this year's art books. She offers an opinionated analysis of what the museum's role is and should be -- a big topic, given that the last three decades have seen more ...

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