In this issue, as has been our practice for the past three
Decembers, we offer our readers a Special Section on art.
This is over and above our usual coverage of the visual
arts, which, though a regular feature, may still be
described as “special” in its breadth and quality.
Readers will find illuminating reviews of
Aristide Maillol’s sculpture (by Karen Wilkin), the painting of Romare
Bearden (Eric Gibson), the objets of the Aztecs (by Peter Pettus), and
the near-collaborations of Joan Miró and Alexander Calder
(by James Panero). In addition, there is a conversation
about art between the figurative painter Philip Pearlstein
and the poet David Yezzi, an essay about
taste by the conservator Marco Grassi, a brief review of a
new book about Winslow Homer’s Gulf Stream (by Roger
Kimball), and excerpts from
the memoirs of the art dealer André Emmerich about the
critic Clement Greenberg and the painter Helen
Frankenthaler. James Panero writes about his experience
lecturing at Benton, a fictional college made famous by
Randall Jarrell but which, in Mr. Panero’s hands, bears a
marked resemblance to an institution in Providence, Rhode
Island, that Mr. Panero happened to attend as a graduate
student.
The biggest event of the season for the art world is the
long-awaited reopening of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Gutted, enlarged, and transformed by the Japanese architect
Yoshio Taniguchi at a cost of $425 million, MOMA—which
had been closed since 2002—is a much bigger, much brighter, and altogether more
imposing institution than anything Alfred H. Barr could have
imagined when he founded the museum in 1929. The art
historian Michael J. Lewis offers a thoughtful look at the
architectural aspects of the new MOMA later in this issue.
Here we would like to offer a few thoughts about what
MOMA in its current incarnation says about the aesthetic
and curatorial vision of the museum as it enters the
twenty-first century.
It is one of the ironies of art history that although Alfred
Barr was a prodigious (and astute) collector of the
contemporary art of his time, the museum that he created was
never a museum of contemporary art (a locution that teeters on
self-contradiction) but a museum devoted to the
representative art of a particular historical period, the
period of high modernism: roughly from 1880–1950. This is a
fact that has never sat easily with the trustees of MOMA,
and it is a fact that, since the death of Barr in 1967, has
been regarded with increasing neglect or disdain by MOMA’s
curators. More and more, MOMA has wanted to be all things
to all interests in the art world, which meant that more and
more it had to bracket its role as a museum of modern art in
order to become a museum of contemporary art. The huge
expansion of the museum by Cesar Pelli in 1984 was, in part,
an effort to accommodate the museum to this new role. The
current expansion has sealed that ambition, so to speak, in
stone.
What we have been given by Mr. Taniguchi and the museum’s
curators is a kind of replica of the Museum of Modern Art.
The itinerary—or, to use a word much favored by MOMA’s
current administration, the “narrative”—envisioned by Barr
has been relegated to the status of a sample storyline in a
large, unwieldy, and inconclusive plot—a plot, moreover,
whose connection with distinctively aesthetic values is
often tenuous at best. In our view, Mr. Taniguchi’s
design—a mixture of gigantism and chilliness masquerading
as elegance—reinforces this tenuousness. Many observers
have already told us that Mr. Taniguchi’s building does
not “compete” with the art it houses. This is true enough:
it doesn’t compete because it doesn’t relate to the art
at all. In this sense, Mr. Taniguchi has admirably fulfilled
the desire of his clients to provide a building that puts
the original spirit of MOMA in its place by impressing the
viewer as a kind of contemporary, white-walled Piranesian
no-place.
It is too early to offer a definitive judgment about the new
MOMA. But walking through Mr. Taniguchi’s mammoth atrium
and trying to get our bearings among the acres of blindingly
white walls, we recalled something that André Malraux said
about museums in his book The Voices of Silence. During
the course of the nineteenth century, Malraux wrote, museums
became so much a part of our experience that “we forget they
have imposed on the spectator a wholly new attitude towards
the work of art. For they have tended to estrange the works
they bring together from their original functions and to
transform even portraits into ‘pictures.’” What Malraux had
in mind was a process of aestheticizing: objects that might
have had their home in ritual or religion, say, were now
appreciated in quite a different way, as instruments of
aesthetic delectation. What we see happening in institutions
like MOMA is a later, perhaps a parodic, stage of this
process. There is, as it were, a second estrangement,
whereby objects that had their home in the realm of art are
regarded as ironic, if valuable, tokens of cultural
exchange. The aim is no longer artistic, even if the project
is undertaken in the name of art. On the contrary, it is
fundamentally an anti-artistic project that cannibalizes
art for the sake of generically cultural entertainments.
Perhaps an anecdote can clarify the sort of change that has
taken place at MOMA over the past few decades.
We remember asking a beautiful and urbane friend where she
met her husband. “Oh, he picked me up in the Museum of
Modern Art,” she said. Yes, of course. MOMA was a famously
romantic venue. It is possible, of course, that it will
continue to be a place of assignation. But the romance,
alas, is quite gone.