Terry has already fled. A new Terry waits in the wings. And the The New Republic at last unleashes what we imagine will be a scorching salvo against Yoshio Taniguchi's big white bunker for The Arts. We would have preferred to hear from our man Filler, but Jed Perl's diss gets off to a good start. Which is all we've seen, and all we will see, until someone braver than we endures the "free registration" and leaks us the text. You know the drill.

[Late Hit: A pal sent about a quarter of the article (???), dumped in below, and it's pretty tart.]

· Arrivederci MoMA [TNR]

JED PERL ON ART
Arrivederci MoMA 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Post date 01.28.06 | Issue date 02.06.06
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I.

There is a paradox at the heart of any cultural institution. It is
that the men and women who dedicate themselves to these essential
enterprises exert a fiscal and administrative discipline that has
nothing whatsoever to do with the discipline of art, which is a
disciplined abandon. I imagine that for anybody who founds or sustains
or rescues or re-invents a museum, an orchestra, or a dance company,
this tension between the institution and the art comes to feel like a
natural paradox. There is always a balancing act involved, which helps
to explain why the very greatest institution-builders (Lincoln
Kirstein comes to mind) invariably have something of the artist's
temperament. And when we consider how rare such people are, we realize
that there is nothing surprising about the fragility, the mediocrity,
and the downright banality of so many cultural enterprises. If making
art is hard, making an arts institution work may be harder still.

I believe it is important to recall the daunting nature of these
challenges as we consider the deeply troubling state of the Museum of
Modern Art a year after its re-opening. While the museum has failed to
live up to the hopes of many of the New Yorkers who care most
passionately about twentieth-century art, the defensiveness that one
hears from both inside and outside the museum is nevertheless
understandable, given the challenges that the museum now faces. The
Modern, with its seventy-fifth birthday past, is entering that
baffling stage when the visionary zeal and megalomaniacal energy of
the founding generation is literally a lifetime away. Inevitably, the
kind of institutional authority that was invented, almost out of whole
cloth, by Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum's founding director and its
guiding spirit into the 1960s, has lost its dramatic aura, becoming
somehow bland: at best a form of institutional prestige that enables
good work to go on, at worst an institutional carapace behind which
anybody can get away with anything. The MoMA watchers who believe that
the glass is less than half full and the ones who believe that it is
close to completely full are making their own judgments as to whether
the institution's newfound fiscal and administrative discipline serves
the disciplined abandon of art. And each view of the present state of
the museum is related to some larger idea about what modern art was or
might become, so that behind any conversation about the Museum of
Modern Art there lurks a deeper conversation about the nature of
institutions and, indeed, about the nature of art.

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Glenn D. Lowry, who has been the director of the museum since 1995,
has never presented a searching account of the nature of an arts
institution, much less the nature of art. Lowry's supporters will
respond that a museum director is a man of action, not an
intellectual, and they may even argue that the boilerplate speeches
and statements that he has frequently made about cultural matters do
in fact constitute a contribution to an ongoing debate. When Lowry
speaks out, however, he speaks as a CEO, and his intention mainly
seems to be to stifle a debate about the transformation of what was
once a chaotically creative institution into a well-oiled
business-model museum. Lowry has earned his position on all those
most-powerful-men-in-the-art-world lists for only one reason: he has
presided over a fund-raising miracle. In the years just before and
just after September 11, with the city in recession, the Museum of
Modern Art managed to raise some $850 million. They moved the museum
to Queens. They built what amounts to a new building. They moved back
to Manhattan. And as a tourist attraction the new MoMA is, we are
told, a success.

Those are the hard facts. But the future of a great institution is not
shaped by hard facts exclusively, and maybe not even primarily. The
question that must be asked about the Modern is at what cost its new
building and its stupendous endowment have been achieved. And you
might say that the question contains the answer, for the problem with
Lowry's MoMA is that the focus is on the health and well-being of the
institution, rather than the quality of our understanding of Cézanne,
Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi, Mondrian--or, for that matter, the quality
of our understanding of contemporary art. If our knowledge of art had
been foremost in Lowry's mind, surely he would not have presided over
a rebuilding program that has, strangely enough, left the museum with
only marginally more room for the display of its unparalleled
collection of painting and sculpture from the first half of the
twentieth century.

But then the artists and avid museumgoers who yearn to see more of the
collection are not Lowry's constituency. Never before has this
museum's attention been so insistently fixed on what are perceived to
be the needs of the tourists and the trustees. One of the first
exhibitions mounted at the Modern after the re-opening, "Contemporary
Voices: Works from the UBS Art Collection," was a corporate put-up
job--an elaborate thank-you to Donald B. Marron, an influential member
of the museum's board of trustees. And last summer's big show,
"Pioneering Modern Painting: Cézanne and Pissarro: 1865-1885," was the
kind of blandly conceived, tourist-friendly blockbuster that you would
expect to see at Tate Modern or the Guggenheim, but never at the
Museum of Modern Art.

Although there have been some bright spots at the Modern this fall--in
the magnificent Redon show and in the re-installation of several
galleries in the permanent collection--this is now a museum where
art's mystery and magic are at best taken for granted, and at worst
ignored. The new building, which I admired for its refined details and
suavely balanced volumes in the weeks before the grand opening, when
it was nearly empty of people, has pretty much proved to be a fiasco.
The more people there are in Yoshio Taniguchi's spaces, the less
poetic those spaces feel, which is just about the most devastating
thing that you can say about a work of public architecture. The fault,
though, is not Taniguchi's alone. Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon,
Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie, and Barnett Newman's Vir Heroicus
Sublimis, those landmarks of twentieth-century art, look lost in the
new museum, because they have been torn from the moral landscape that
they inhabited, with its visionary fervor and its progressivist
ideals. While the curators at the Modern would have us believe that
they are currently engaged in the perfectly legitimate task of
rethinking that landscape--of giving its modern perspectives a
postmodern overhaul--Lowry has in fact turned the whole damn landscape
into a mall in which Picasso, Matisse, and Mondrian are merely what
happens to be available, as interchangeable as H&M, Target, and the
Gap.

The Modern--with its departments devoted to film, photography, and
architecture and design, as well as to painting and sculpture and
prints and drawings--always offered one-stop aesthetic shopping, and
in that sense the museum was always, as some have pointed out, playing
a dangerous game. As long ago as 1949, Wallace Stevens complained in a
letter of the museum's "professional modernism," and wondered, "Is all
this really hard thinking, really high feeling or is it a lot of
nobodies running after a few somebodies?" Barr helped the world accept
modernity, and if the museum's "Good Design" shows of the early 1950s
prefigure the low-priced elegance of IKEA, the Modern's pioneering
"Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism" show of 1936 is somewhere in the
prehistory of Jeff Koons's floating basketballs and porcelain Michael
Jackson. To the bargain-conscious shopper who visits the Modern's
design collection today, the museum may look like a spiffier version
of IKEA, while the trustee who has just paid $1 million for a Koons is
certainly going to want MoMA to endorse the investment. A museum that
was alive to the challenge would want to confound the expectations of
both the tourists and the trustees, but Lowry seems happy to give
everybody what they expect. He must imagine that this is synergy. It
is a synergy that denies out-of-town visitors to MoMA what they
fervently desire, which is a museum that represents the heart and soul
of artistic New York, or did once upon a time.

Next: "Glenn Lowry is the first man to guide the Modern who is not,
essentially, a visionary curator."

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