When you ask Matt Mullican where his new museum is, he hesitates. It’s a fair question, and he doesn’t have a tidy answer. The exhibition he’s been building in Liechtenstein, called THAT NOTHING SHOULD EXIST, is the largest of his career — hundreds of works spread across rooms that flood with light through enormous skylights. But none of it sits anywhere you could drive to. ‘The scale is massive,’ he says, ‘but in this instance, nothing does exist.’ The whole thing lives inside a virtual world called Roarington Art Center, and it’s set to open to the public in February.
There’s something almost funny about the premise. A California-born artist who started sketching out what it might feel like to step into a digital space back in the early 1970s, now finally walking through one. Mullican has spent decades on visual systems, on the question of how we map knowledge and perception, and he was using virtual reality at MoMA in the ’90s when most people thought VR was a toy. So this isn’t a stunt for him. It’s a homecoming of sorts, and you can sense he knows it.
The money and the conviction behind Roarington come from an unlikely corner: classic cars. Fritz Kaiser, a Liechtenstein-based entrepreneur, started a non-profit in 2013 to preserve automotive heritage through digital tools, and that project grew into Roarington. The art center was born in a conversation with his friend Michael Ringier, the Swiss publisher and collector who now runs it. Their logic was that car people and art people aren’t so different — both obsess over design, both worry about preservation, both want beautiful things to outlast them. So they fused the two. It’s a tidy story, maybe too tidy, but it tracks.
What’s striking is how openly Ringier admits the skepticism he ran into. When he first floated the idea to curators and gallerists, he got raised eyebrows. He says it doesn’t bother him because he saw the exact same faces twenty years ago when he pushed digital journalism. ‘Journalists were extremely skeptical,’ he recalls, ‘but now we don’t even discuss it.’ Whether the art world bends the same way is genuinely unclear. Art has a stubborn attachment to the physical object — to the brushstroke, the surface, the thing you can stand in front of — that newspapers never really had.
The architect, Benedetto Camerana, seems to have had the most fun of anyone. Building in the metaverse freed him from budgets and gravity both. He compares his approach to the visionary French architects Boullée and Ledoux, who imagined sublime buildings that mostly never got built. Visitors approach Roarington and first meet a giant slab of metal — a wall set into the landscape with a cut you’re invited to walk through, then a bridge floating over a sunken garden. Inside, red accents nod to Italian racing. It’s roughly 6,000 square meters, though Camerana notes scale is fluid here; you can shrink to a hundredth of your size and wander the place like a Lilliputian.
It’s hard not to notice how much of this echoes an old idea. In 1947, André Malraux dreamed of a musée imaginaire — a museum without walls, where photography would let anyone hold the world’s art in their hands. He was right about the impulse, if not the medium. The question now is whether immersive worlds are photography’s true heir or just another experiment that fades, like the NFT showrooms that felt urgent a few years ago and now feel quaint.
Ringier is careful on this point, and I think wisely so. ‘This museum will never be able to replace anything,’ he says. ‘It’s adding something.’ No shipping crates, no insurance nightmares, no spatial limits, and access from anywhere at any hour. Those are real advantages. Whether they add up to something people will actually return to, year after year, is the part nobody can promise yet. For now, the doors — such as they are — are about to open.
