It hasn’t been a good year for Thomas Krens and his Guggenheim empire. The Las Vegas outpost so gloriously hyped when it opened has closed, and is likely to be demolished soon, and the plans for a massive new Gehry-designed home in Manhattan are on indefinite hold. The Guggenheim’s latest exhibit of “classics” of modern art could be seen as just one more example of how the museum is being forced to retreat from the bold, avant-garde stance it adopted in the 1990s. But, says James Gardner, there’s more to this new-old approach than just a reflection of hard times: “It’s hard to find a single work among the 100 odd pieces in this show that is anything less than exemplary.”