WHAT WILL THE MUSEUM of the twenty-first century look like? According to the Van Abbemuseum, it won’t present chronological arrangements against neutral walls and it will include numerous collaborative arrangements with artists. It will also serve as a vehicle for star curators, whose visionary installations will merit the same reconstruction and redisplay accorded ephemeral works of art. “Play Van Abbe,” a four-part cycle currently in its second stage, enacts this new model with an exhibition about exhibitions, looking to the past in order to envision the museum’s future.

The decision to reanimate