I'd like to begin with a tale of two cities, and two "spaces in transition." These spaces—new museums of contemporary art in Helsinki, Finland and Bilbao, Spain—have a number of things in common, and also some very real differences as models of cultural change and exchange.

I recently visited these museums in Helsinki and Bilbao. The most obvious similarity between the two museums is that they are both extraordinary physical structures, designed by two fine architects. Both Steven Holl and Frank Gehry set out to create spaces that would be especially hospitable to contemporary art.

The differences between the two spaces arise from their social contexts—the ways that they are being used. In fact, these two spaces can be seen as exemplars of two very different ways of thinking about culture at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki used to be tucked into part of the third floor of the Atheneum, Finland's National Gallery. A few years ago they decided they needed a new building for the contemporary museum. They held an architectural design competition and chose New York architect Steven Holl to build the museum. The choice was immediately controversial. Finland has a rich architectural tradition and many excellent contemporary architects working today, so bringing in someone from outside, especially from New York, to design such an important public building was not at all well received.

Then there was the matter of location. The site chosen for the new museum was right in the middle of Helsinki, wedged between existing structures (opposite the 1920s Parliament building and just down the street from Saarinen's Finnish Museum and Aalto's Finlandia Hall) and virtually on top of an equestrian statue of Finland's national war hero, General Mannerheim. Every time the Russians invaded Finland, Mannerheim rode in and distinguished himself in battle, so a lot of older Finns took this monument very seriously.

In fact, one of the reasons Holl's plan was accepted was that he agreed to build the museum around the Mannerheim statue, so that it would not have to be moved. Now, in one public space, you have old Finland, always proud in its resistance to outside incursions, and the new Finland of ubiquitous cell phones, corporate permeability, and international culture, in uneasy cohabitation. You also have War and Art, Mars and Apollo, face to face.

So there were bitter controversies, political and social, surrounding the construction of the museum. But Holl completed the building, on time and under budget (the official figure was $40 million, elsewhere I've read $57 million), and people now seem genuinely pleased with it. The museum, dubbed "Kiasma" after Holl's original working title, is quite a handsome, if somewhat unconventional, building: no two of the galleries are alike, none have straight walls, and the light is different in each. Holl was awarded the Alvar Aalto medal for his work, and even General Mannerheim has never looked better.

I spent an afternoon with the Chief Curator of Kiasma, Maaretta Jaukkuri, and I liked her quite a lot. She is smart and tough; she has a good sense of history and a great sense of humor (which she especially needed in the weeks and months surrounding the museum's opening). She is quite clear about what Kiasma means for Finland. The new museum has already drawn an unprecedented amount of attention to contemporary art in Finland, and Jaukkuri has noticed that Finnish artists are already showing a new level of confidence in their dealings with the world outside of Finland. In my many visits to studios in Helsinki, I also saw evidence of this new attitude. There are some very good artists working there. Unfortunately, the international art world seems to have room for only one Finnish artist at a time. For awhile now it has been Esko Männikkö; now it looks as if it's going to be Eija-Liisa Ahtila.

Both Jaukkuri and the museum's director, Tuula Arkio, are outspoken in their insistence that there is more to a museum than its physical structure, and they went to work right away to make sure that Kiasma is integrated into the larger social life of the city. Its central location, long hours (it's open till 10 p.m.), and open door policies (no admission fee for the ground floor) have already made it a popular meeting place. There's a decent cafe, a good bookstore and reading room, a room for children, and a well-programmed theater and cinema for performance, dance, multimedia, film, music, and literature. They've launched an artist exchange program, providing an opportunity for artists to work in the heart of the museum. The first show was accompanied by an extensive program of discussions, conferences, and publications.

One of the first people I met in Finland was a German curator scouting talent for a show of Baltic photography, and she spoke with open contempt of the "archaic localism" of many Finnish artists in contrast to the fluid internationalism of their counterparts in Norway and Sweden. That was precisely what attracted me about Finnish artists. They are anxious to have their work seen and judged outside of Finland, but they are not anxious to change their work to make it "more international," i.e., less Finnish. What the German curator called "archaic localism" is what my friend Anselm Hollo, a great Finnish expatriate poet, called years ago "Finnitude" (Finnish attitude), that particular refusal to become entirely assimilated or consumed into international mass culture, to abandon their Finnishness. This tension between localism and globalism is a lot of what people are talking about in and around Kiasma (the name itself means a crossing of cultures).

If anyone is talking about these things in and around the new Guggenheim in Bilbao, I wasn't hearing it. Nevertheless, I love Gehry's building in Bilbao. I love the way it opens like a flower and modulates the light throughout the interior. I love the way it sits there on the Nervión River like a space- or sailing ship. I love the aspiration of the form, and the way the whole thing works, the way visitors are drawn in and guided through the nooks and crannies of the building so that each new view appears as a revelation. I love everything about this building—except what it is being used for, and what this is saying about the place of culture in society.

Because the Guggenheim Bilbao has, at this point, nothing to do with Bilbao. It is a satellite, tethered to the Bilbao bus station and airport by a constant stream of taxis carrying tourists in and out, and to the controlling corporation in New York City through a one-way conduit of content, while the good people of Bilbao go on about their business; or not, since unemployment in Bilbao is currently 25%. Bilbao is an old style industrial city that is trying to shift from an economy based on heavy industry to one based on service, information, and culture. As one resident put it, "If you are a good worker who makes chairs and then, one day, they don't need any more chairs, you do something else." But these workers are not making anything now. The Guggenheim hasn't even hired a director for the museum. The shows come from the Guggenheim home offices in New York to here, and that's it.

For that reason, this incredibly beautiful building is an empty shell, as vacuous as Koon's topiary Puppy, plopped down at the entrance like one of those blimps announcing a sale. No wonder the E.T.A. tried to blow that puppy up.

Housed in one of the great architectural achievements of our time, the museum is in operation nothing more than a retail outlet. Culture is produced elsewhere and exported to be consumed. Neither the rich artistic heritage of the Basques nor the history of Basque socialism and Bilbao's labor struggles have been given any place in the Guggenheim Bilbao. The gallery supposedly reserved for Picasso's Guernica instead holds a banality by the flavor-of-the-month Damien Hirst. The Basque government has purchased the Guggenheim franchise in Spain.

Guggenheim director Thomas Krens says that the Guggenheim "has entered into collaborations with foreign governments and corporations to establish permanent museums abroad that would be operated by, and in conjunction with, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, to produce access to a wider audience and to realize economies and efficiencies of scale through joint and collaborative operations." But what is the nature of this "collaboration?" Bilbao pays for the construction and maintenance of the physical structure (the form), and the Guggenheim in New York provides the programming (the content). The form is site-specific, but the content is not, no matter how Krens spins it: "In the process of developing this new institution, the Guggenheim has become Basque. Basque hopes and aspirations are now ours as well."

This is the voice of the New Globalism. The Guggenheim has "become Basque" in the same way that Coca-Cola "became Chinese." If culture is a commodity, a product, or product line produced in one place and then marketed and consumed elsewhere, what exactly is being consumed? And what, exactly, is being cultivated?

The second part of my title, "I Wonder How the Angel of History Will Look Crossing the Bridge to the 21st Century," refers to Walter Benjamin's vision inspired by the Paul Klee painting Angelus Novus. It shows an angel with wild hair and eyes, with its wings raised and unfurled. Klee's angel looks quite terrified. Benjamin said that is what the angel of history must look like. A big wind has gotten caught in the angel's wings and is propelling it backwards into the future. Whereas we see things happening as a chain of events, the angel of history only sees what has happened, as the wreckage caves in and piles up at her feet. Benjamin concludes that the wind in the angel's wings, this "storm blowing from Paradise," is what we call Progress.

Now appearing in the angel's path, I've imagined, is ex-President Clinton's "Bridge to the 21st Century." This image arose as a tactical campaign response to Bob Dole's "Bridge to the Past," which didn't play so well. After the election, it became clear that Clinton's bridge would be constructed out of the New Globalism (NAFTA, GATT, etc.). It is one more step in the transformation of the economic into the cultural and vice versa. The question is no longer whether there should be global consumer market relations, but whether there should be anything else. Sic transit gloria mundi.

This bridge could become a treacherous obstacle to the Angel of History, and I wonder how the angel will look crossing it, as the wreckage piles up behind her, filling the channel and threatening to push her off the bridge. We cannot go back now. The winds of Progress are too strong. But we can still make choices about what happens. Only with the "carrying across" of tradition, and the cautionary abrasion of resistance, will disaster be averted.

David Levi Strauss recently published a book of essays on contemporary art and media culture entitled Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art & Politics (Autonomedia). An earlier version of this essay appeared in the exhibition catalog espacios en Transición - Transición en espacios, published by the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (Santurce, 1998).