THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART in New York reopened on November 20 after a three-year--and $425 million--renovation. The occasion has drawn the art world like Nagas at Kumbh Mela to the building. But as the expanded museum has been praised for the modernist restraint of its new design, the actual art seems to have been pushed aside.
Designed by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, and encompassing the shells of the 1939 Goodwin and Stone building on West 53rd Street and the 1953 Johnson sculpture garden, the new MOMA has sheared away Cesar Pelli's 1984 glassed-in atrium and shifts the weight of the collection into a new building to the west of Pelli's residential tower. The goal, architecturally, was perhaps an impossible one: to expand available exhibition space, to preserve much of the old footprint, and to create a package that was architecturally harmonious.
Restricted outside, Taniguchi turned his attention in. The result is neither a new museum nor a purely reconditioned one but a half-breed. If the unfortunate idiom of the 1984 museum was the shopping mall, here it is the big-box store. The innocuousness of the new design only underscores its new purpose. With a crater carved through the middle, the museum has become a six-story emporium of art, finished off with slick materials and a nonthreatening aesthetic.
Where the focus of the old museum was outward to the sculpture garden and the city around it, the museum now turns inward. Self-contained and cut off, MOMA sells ideas--or maybe just one idea: the cool place of a modern art museum in a postmodern world.
Through its postmodern send-up of modernism, the art is the background to the retail experience happening around it. MOMA now represents modern art as catch-as-catch-can, an IKEA museum.
The founding director of the museum, Alfred H. Barr, had a different idea of the Modern, which he revealed through his acquisitions and his arrangement of the museum's permanent collection starting in 1929. Barr once wrote that "This museum is a torpedo moving through time, its head the ever-advancing present, its tail the ever receding past of 50 to 100 years ago." But the torpedo of modernism self-destructed in the late 1960s (perhaps not surprisingly, around the time of Barr's retirement). No one is quite sure what has happened to contemporary art in the past forty years, but it certainly has not been Barr art, which stressed form over content, an attention to materials (drawing, print, and photography included), and a linear storyline that has become known as a "formalist" canon of modernism.
As art became "plural" and more concerned with the theatrics of display, the museum found itself with a problem--how to keep modernism current. One solution proposed by the Taniguchi redesign has been to relocate the famous permanent collection of twentieth-century art to the fourth and fifth floors of the new building--in innocuous rooms that eliminate Barr's chronology and mount his art like trophies out of the way of contemporary displays. Here, according to the curator John Elderfield, "The movements of modern art--and accordingly these galleries--may be thought of as a succession of arguments and counterarguments on the continually disputed subject of what it means to make art for the modern age. As such, this reinstallation of the collection allows visitors to follow different paths through the galleries and follow the circuitous history of modern art." Special exhibitions go on Level Six; drawings, photography, architecture and design on Level Three. Ladies perfume and handbags remain on Level One.
IN FACT, selling the lifestyle of modern art is central to MOMA's new mission. The new museum has several dining options, all managed by Danny Meyer of Union Square Cafe. You might now alight to the aroma of "truffled walleye pike sausages with lobster sauce" while visiting Monet's Water Lilies, ingloriously removed from its former chapel to the overscaled public atrium. There are also three retail stores here in which to browse (Op-art cufflinks, $200; Built-By-Me Rock-It Chair, $95). Front-loaded with contemporary pieces, the design section of the museum might as well be an outlet of Conran's.
Good or bad, the narrative and urgency of Barr's modernist history displayed institutional confidence and a connoisseur's eye. The new museum, despite all its money and corporate tie-ins, no longer has the swagger. The old museum forecast the art of the future. It was wrong, of course, but at least it tried.
This new museum can't even decide what it thinks about the past. The policy of entrenchment is perhaps a wise one. But the results are a silencing of the dialogue Alfred Barr hoped to draw out--ideas that were once the soul of the museum, even more than its masterpieces by Picasso or Cezanne.
A thesis or counter-thesis on modernism would have been welcome in new MOMA. But the museum now gives the viewer little with which to react. The result is not a liberation from orthodoxy, but a suspicion that this institution no longer cares to discuss art with its visitors in a serious way.
You might say that the history of modernism now starts with Cézanne's The Bather, continues through Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Matisse's Dance, Pollock's One (Number 31, 1950), and arrives, at last, at the "Targetini"--the drink served at the museum's opening-night gala, named after one of MOMA's new corporate sponsors, the big-box chain store Target. The night of the party, there was even a Target Lounge outside the department of painting and sculpture on the fifth floor.
An old favorite of New Yorkers is when the country mouse confuses MOMA with the Met, and asks the city mouse directions to the "Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art."
But this is just what MOMA has become. What was until recently an artist's museum, with a warren of cramped rooms and favorite spots, is aiming now to become another art institution--big, impersonal, and traditional. Mad to continue along this path, the museum is already planning its next expansion.
Once upon a time the Museum of Modern Art was a great place to bring a date. Now it is a great place to lose one. With a new $20 admission fee--the highest of any museum in the city--one might consider going it alone.
James Panero is associate editor of the New Criterion.