Museum Cities
Here the collection is the city's reason for being — sometimes a capital of galleries, sometimes a village around a single great museum. Museum cities are built for the slow morning and the second visit.
A museum destination is a place where a collection is the reason to travel, and the interesting question is how it got there.
A building can make a city. Bilbao's shipyards collapsed in the 1980s and the Basque government gambled on a Gehry Guggenheim; the visitor numbers exceeded every projection and the phrase Bilbao effect entered urban planning. That gamble has been imitated everywhere and rarely repeated.
Or a fortune can. Crystal Bridges was built by a Walmart heir in her hometown in the Ozarks; the Barnes hangs exactly as its owner arranged it because his will forbids moving anything.
Or an artist decided. Judd left New York for west Texas, bought a decommissioned army fort and installed a hundred milled aluminium boxes so the light would change them through the day — permanent installation was his answer to museums rearranging work.
Provenance is stated. Where holdings were looted, bought under duress or removed under colonial administration, the portrait says so and names the claim.
Check what is on loan before you travel.