Word: moma
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Even the man who gets to fill most of that space, John Elderfield, is staying pretty calm. That can't be easy when you remember that the entire art world is watching to see just how Elderfield, who became MOMA's chief curator of painting and sculpture last year, will rearrange the museum's vast collection. It's a treasury of works so famous that his biggest problem isn't getting people to come look at them--MOMA is counting on about 1.8 million visitors a year--but getting people to see them, to penetrate the haze of reproduction that...
More to the point, which artworks he and his three curator colleagues decide to hang on the museum's walls is a heated question. Even among people who complain that the Modern gives short shrift to the new, no other institution has MOMA's power to confer legitimacy on both the living and the dead. What it anoints as central to the story of modern art is hugely influential among scholars, collectors and other museums. And what MOMA minimizes must struggle a bit to be taken seriously. The old Modern was never particularly interested in postwar British art. Will...
Elderfield promises more emphasis on the new. And he now has a museum with galleries large enough to accommodate supersize work, like Richard Serra's massive steel sculptures, MOMA's new piece by Gordon Matta-Clark that consists of a large section cut from an entire house and the room-size installations that became more common in the '70s and after. The danger of so vast an expansion, of course, was that MOMA would itself become economy size, an alienating blimp hangar. "The most cherished dimension of the old museum was its sense of intimacy," says Glenn Lowry, MOMA...
Taniguchi was a surprise selection to design the new MOMA. Although the architect has a number of choice projects to his credit in Japan, including eight museums, the man is so little known in the U.S. that one baffled well-wisher congratulated Terence Riley, MOMA's chief curator of architecture and design, thinking the museum had selected an Italian architect, Tony Gucci. In an era of glamorously expressionist architecture, of Frank Gehry's voluptuous Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, MOMA has opted for a work of what you might call old-fashioned Modernism, clean-lined and rectilinear, a subtly updated version...
...fact, what Taniguchi has delivered is a building that offers MOMA to the world as the global headquarters of Modern Art Inc. With its long, immaculate planes of charcoal gray granite and milky white glass, his museum emanates taste, restraint, formal intelligence and authority. Those are occasional values of contemporary art as well. Then again, so are effrontery, vulgarity and obfuscation, with occasional detours into buffoonery, kitsch and porn. If it's at the heart of MOMA's mission to continually sort through the muck, it will now do so in a building that says the art world may have...