This month, twenty-eight years ago, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened to the public. Today, the Frank Gehry-designed museum located in the Basque region of north-west Spain manages to be celebrated and reviled in equal measure. Cultural investment, particularly of “starchitecture”,  imported to reverse the waning fortunes of a city, is now referred to as the “Bilbao effect”, while “McGuggenheim” has also entered parlance—acknowledgement of the cultural imperialism leveraged by outposts of large mainstream museums...