Martin Kippenberger in Venice, Italy (1996) © E. Semotan |
The Museum of Modern Art houses the world’s most important collection of twentieth-century art. It owns work without which modernism’s tumultuous and often brilliant narrative is inconceivable. As a result, the museum’s influence has, since its inception, been international in scope and has done much to color the way in which modernism has been interpreted. In recent years, MOMA has equivocated curatorially and been upstaged by the flashy vagaries of the commercial art scene, but its clout is undiminished. MOMA’s imprimatur continues to matter.
It is significant, then, that the museum is giving a stamp of approval to the late German artist Martin Kippenberger. Although it was organized by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, “Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective,” a retrospective covering about twenty years, gains credence in no small part because MOMA has decided to host it. A significant amount of New York real estate is currently devoted to the artist’s prodigious output, not least being the museum’s famously inhospitable atrium where you’ll find Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika”(1994), an installation of desks, lawn chairs, coatracks, organic matter disintegrating in jars, bleachers, and sundry other objects. The sixth-floor galleries are less densely packed, but the items in them are similarly various. Among them is a Ford automobile that’s been rolled with oats and painted an unhappy shade