BASEL, Switzerland (The New York Times)—Do the contemporary art museums in this Swiss city simply show more respect to contemporary art than their American counterparts? It’s a question pondered by Roberta Smith of the New York Times as she recently explored the exhibitions that launched in mid-June to coincide with Art Basel 37. Her answer? “It sure feels that way,” Smith writes.

Comparing American sensibilities with the laid-back hospitality, “dazzlingly meticulous” attention to detail, “thorough exhibitions” and “unobtrusive architecture” at Basel museums like the Kunsthalle (host this summer to a Lee Lozano retrospective) and others, “It’s easy to feel that museums back home have a lot to learn,” Smith continues.

At the Schaulager, “another felicitous Swiss innovation on the museological front,” an unwieldy installation of wood steps flowing with water and a subterranean grotto by Robert Gober lives on permanent display, lovingly displayed even though the work presents a “logistical nightmare.” Architecturally, the museum deserves praise as well. Designed by Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron, the building is “an impressive combination of geometric modernity and Swiss rusticity and practicality,” according to Smith.

Smith says the Hallen fur Neue Kunst in nearby Schaffhausen is a “likely model” for the Dia: Beacon in New York and other art spaces in retrofitted factory buildings. The museum was established in 1984 in a former textile factory near the Rhine and devotes a considerable amount of space to the work of post-War artists such as Robert Ryman, Donald Judd and Joseph Beuys.

New York Times: In Basel, Contemporary Art Enjoys a Bounty of Friends