By the end, like the nutty uncle at the holiday table, Mr. Krens had become at best a distraction, at worst an embarrassment. It was impossible to do a story on him in which the negatives didn't outweigh the positives. Bilbao has been a success, but there were all those dubious and failed expansion schemes, the baldly commercial exhibitions and the neglect of the flagship Frank Lloyd Wright building on Fifth Avenue, now undergoing a belated renovation. When the director, not the institution, becomes the subject, the institution has a problem.

This January, board chairman and insurance executive Peter B. Lewis quit the board in protest over Mr. Krens's financial management ("The numbers presented were incomprehensible to me," he told David D'Arcy on this page in June.) While the media interpreted this as a victory for Mr. Krens, it now looks as if Mr. Krens won the battle but lost the war. Although Ms. Dennison will nominally report to him, it would be a surprise if she turns out to be a Krens clone. I think we can expect a more sober style and fewer Walter Mitty extravaganzas.

• Architecture as the solution to a marketing, not a facilities, problem. The Guggenheim Bilbao became an instant tourist attraction when it opened in 1997, showing the power of architecture to "brand" an institution. Ever since, directors and their boards have embraced expansion with a vengeance, looking to iconic buildings to define their museums in the public mind and pull in visitors.

• Deaccessioning. Once upon a time, museums sold art from their collections rarely and judiciously. Then Mr. Krens rewrote the rules when he sold important works by Kandinsky and Brancusi to buy a collection of 1960s Minimalist art. Today, institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art are following suit, strip mining their collections for important works by major artists to raise money for contemporary art purchases. In another era, they might have turned to their trustees for funds. But with board members tapped out on Bilbao-like expansion projects, there's only one other place to raise the necessary cash: the collection.

• Art and commerce. Traditionally, museums have tried to draw a bright line between the two lest they compromise their scholarly independence in fact or appearance. Mr. Krens erased that line with his motorcycle show (1998) and the exhibition of Giorgio Armani clothing (2001)--the latter, just coincidentally, at the time of a $15 million donation by Armani Corp. So many museums have followed suit that it is now commonplace to see exhibitions on such subjects as "Star Wars," electric guitars, jewelry and fashion on calendars around the country.

We're living in the Krens Era. And it isn't going to end anytime soon.