New York Magazine‘s art critic wants MoMA to use the recession as an opportunity to show more art and change the way we look at modernity–and its after effects:
MoMA inarguably possesses the greatest collection of modern art in the world. It is our Garden of Eden, the place we go to visit the ancestors. Yet after spending three-quarters of a billion dollars in 2004 for its spiffy new building MoMA inexplicably, maybe unforgivably, failed to provide enough room to let that collection soar, or even to tell the whole wild story of modernism. And, a few years later, some say that garden—our garden—is wilting, even that its dying. Since it is unlikely that MoMA will take this open moment to present art history as the tremendous spaghetti-like mix that it really is, staying wedded to its diagrammatic Old Testament version of modern art that runs from Cubism to Surrealism, the museum could think about shaking up the fourth floor. MoMA could dismantle the entire space and hang only Postminimal art or Abstract Expressionism for a year. Something. Anything to inject life into the ossifying body.
