  urlLink The New York Times > Arts > Art & Design > Karma? Top Floor, Next to Shoes : "Stalled in a cab one evening in 1998, the businessman Donald Rubin leaned out his window, stunned by a thought.
Next to him loomed the dark, vacant Barney's building at 150 West 17th Street in Chelsea. In a flash, Mr. Rubin decided to buy the building, gut it and make a new museum in Manhattan, a glittering showcase for a reclusive spiritual art from the other end of the earth.
The Rubin Museum of Art opens on Oct. 2 with kite flying on the West Side piers, a Himalayan dog parade and some 100 fluttering prayer flags by contemporary artists. An infusion of $60 million has transformed a decommissioned temple of haute consumerism into an elegant, multihued jewel of a museum, designed by the architect Richard Blinder of Beyer Blinder Belle.
Its 70,000 square feet, decked out in bright red, green, gold and blue, comprise America's largest, boldest and most significant museum devoted entirely to Tibetan and other Himalayan art. The spiral staircase by Andrée Putman, which once led up to $35,000 dresses, is now the spiraling center of a primarily Buddhist institution celebrating release from worldly desires. Spiritual images nurtured for 1,300 years in the profound silence of the highest peaks have found a home in the tumultuous cultural capital of the world. Nowhere in American museums are the contradictions so striking..." 
