 The redesigned Museum of Modern Art, by Yoshio Tanaguchi |
Given this state of affairs, I thought I might take the opportunity to comment on the new 800-pound gorilla on the New York art scene, the new MoMA.
The world's first institution dedicated to something called "Modern Art" re-opened its doors just before Thanksgiving, although God help those who tried to make their way through the (free!) opening day crowd. The hoi polloi now have to cough up $20 to get in, with discounts for students and seniors. Target Free Friday Nights (that's what they actually call it) take place from 4 to 8pm for those without such deep pockets. The museum has been encouraging individual memberships at $75 a pop, a deal if you plan on visiting more than three times a year; however, their best kept secret is a special artist member rate of only $35. To get this deal you have to ask and, in some cases apparently, provide some sort of proof that you are a working artist.
Reviews of the new museum—both the building itself and the re-hanging of its newly beefed-up collection—seem to be all over the map. On the one hand, Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times hails the new installation as presenting "the familiar, early story of modernism that the Modern virtually invented under its founding director and genius, Alfred H. Barr Jr. ...The story is now retold in an installation, overseen by the curator John Elderfield, that is about as ravishing as any sequence of galleries in any new museum I can recall." Kimmelman is openly relieved that the curators have abandoned the anti-formalist experimentation of the "MoMA2000" mini-exhibitions that preceded the museum's decampment to the temporary Queens space. On the other hand, notoriously cranky Hilton Kramer, formerly of the Times and now writing for the New York Observer, believes the curators have followed precisely that strategy (which he similarly detests), lamenting the abandonment of Barr's founding formalist-historical vision. And just to keep everyone even more thoroughly confused, the progressive-minded Holland Cotter, also writing for the Times, focused his limited comments on the prominence of Cezanne's Bather (1885), "the painting [that] served as a kind of logo for 'MoMA2000,' the series of three extraordinary experimental reinstallations that preceded the move to Queens."
So which way is it? Was "MoMA2000" good or bad? Does the re-installation of the Modern's classic works repeat those strategies, or return to Alfred Barr's formalist categorization of the works? I think these questions are inevitably rhetorical, at least in the current moment. The ultimate meaning of the new MoMA will arise in the response of its audience over time.
What the hell was "modernism" to begin with? It started with a bunch of people reacting to and trying to represent the incessant newness that permeated everyday life in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, when the pace of life kept moving faster and faster, and everything—from clothing to food to entertainment to art—changed fashion seemingly overnight. The quest was always to stay on top of things, not be left behind somehow, and thus being "modern" (that is, up-to-date, cutting edge) became an essential survival trait. Manet may have scandalized his contemporaries when he painted a contemporary Parisian courtesan in Olympia, but for successive generations the shock has worn off, leaving us with a tarty masterpiece. As Robert Hughes memorably put it, art became dedicated to "the shock of the new."
But how long can everything be made incessantly new? By my count, it seems like 100, maybe a 125 years. Today, the tables have turned, and now it's the investment bankers who concern themselves with the oxymoron of cutting-edge, blue-chip art. Some artists in this system like to think that they are making subversive commentary on money and power in contemporary society, but they operate more like a pack of entertaining monkeys, so long as they stay inside the hothouse of the shockingly small "international art world." Leaf through the past year's worth of Artforum or Art in America—how many artists', how many curators' names are repeated 10 or 20 times? And this on a planet of more than six billion people?
Back when the original modernist "geniuses" presented in the sacred book of MoMA started out, there was only a very sketchy market for the (at the time) disturbing avant-garde work they were churning out. Even Picasso couldn't stand the Demoiselles d'Avignon, and hid it away in storage for years after it had initially shocked his friends in 1907. There are wags now re-baptizing the new MoMA as the "Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art"—a sign of its institutional power as the arbiter of this bit of art history. The convergence of such cultural power, in the context of an $858 million renovation, should give everyone pause. (Architect Yoshio Taniguchi famously told the deep-pocketed board, "Give me a lot of money and I will give you a beautiful building. Give me more and I will make it disappear." They opted for the latter.)
Maybe the most subversive response is not to jump mindlessly on the bandwagon with such immensely over-capitalized institutions. Like Dia:Beacon, I will visit the new MoMA with a certain sense of gratitude for having made a particular part of art history available "in the flesh." But as a critic, I'll be damned if I'll let these institutions embed art in amber for me. The only answer is to continue to look, and to live, and to find honest work that I love—regardless of the price tag or the cachet of the gallery it's in. I can only hope that my observations, in the year to come, will help you, gentle reader, connect with the same.