MUSICAL HEIRS.

IT WILL COME AS REASSURANCE that Switzerland, the national cliche of clockwork orderliness, is awhir with all the messy passions that make the rest of us tick. So it turns out from the recent affair at the Kunsthaus Zurich, one of two prominent Swiss institutions facing a changeover in directors, where there was sufficient intrigue, spite, and stifled ambition to pack a tawdry novel--minus, unfortunately, the sex.

In the spring of '99, the announced retirement of Felix Baumann, the twenty-three-year director of the Kunsthaus, spurred an executive search committee into sputtering action. The president of the board, Thomas Bechtler, hunkered down with a small group of board members that included artist Peter Fischli, the city's mayor, a local collector, and Jacqueline Burckhardt, a publisher of the art journal Parkett, whose coequal Bice Curiger happens to be an adjunct curator at the Kunsthaus as well. An expert advisory panel was mustered, with Nicholas Serota of the Tate; Suzanne Page of the Musee d'Art Moderne de Ia Ville de Paris; Uwe Schneede of the Hamburger Kunsthalle; and Stanislaus von Moos, a professor of art history at the University of Zurich (though their counsel would prove to be little more than words in the wind). Six months of duly methodical Swissness brought the board committee to the point of assembling its list of qualifications for the new director--not an easy task, apparently, for an institution with some 5,000 works spanning art from the twelfth century to the present; a building in need of renovation and more display space; an exhibition program long considered sleepy at best; and a …