Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA) & Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (MAC)

The Palacio de Bellas Artes is the city's fine arts museum, housed in a regal, neoclassical building inaugurated on the eve of Chile's centennial independence day in 1910. The palace has a noteworthy glass cupola that softly lights the vast lobby. The importance of the permanent installations in the Fine Arts museum may be debatable (an uneven mix of Chilean and international artists' works since the colonial period), but lately they've been hosting temporary exhibitions of international artists such as Damian Hirst, Henri-Cartier Bresson, and David Hockney, to name a few, so it's worth stopping by to see what is on offer. Within the same building, but entering from the back, is the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (MAC), the city's modern art museum and part of the University of Chile. This museum hosts temporary exhibitions of national and international modern art, yet such heavyweights as Hirst are typically shown in the Fine Arts Museum.

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