February 10, 2006
Perl on MoMA
I do the reading so you don't have to, this time making my way through Jed Perl's 6,000-word screed about the new MoMA. It is, of course, both suavely written and problematic. Among other things, Perl damns curators that don't agree with his taste and uses slithery language to compliment those that do, in essence crediting them for getting out of the way. ("Jodi Hauptman, the curator in charge, understands that the development of Redon's art . . . has its own dramatic force.") There are two points worth salvaging, however. The first is a criticism that seems to me to have some merit, and that I haven't seen voiced elsewhere so directly:
"Glenn Lowry is the first man to guide the Modern who is not, essentially, a visionary curator. While the museum has had a director whose chief focus is fiscal and administrative for the past fifty years, up until now the leadership structure was essentially bipartite, with the director in fact occupying a somewhat less central role than the chief curatorial figure, whether that was Alfred Barr or William Rubin or Kirk Varnedoe. This unique arrangement originated in the late 1940s and ended in 2001, when Varnedoe, who was in the later phases of a long and unsuccessful battle with cancer, resigned. It was Varnedoe's departure that ushered in the Age of Lowry. Without understanding this essential shift in the leadership of MoMA, it is impossible to grasp the absolutely changed nature of the museum—changes that many people found themselves talking about a few days ago, when Rubin, who retired in 1988, died at seventy-eight."
The other is a criticism mentioned frequently but which remains true more than a year after the museum reopened:
"Almost as soon as the noisy media-drenched re-opening of the Museum of Modern Art was over, a strange silence enveloped the museum and all its doings. To be sure, its shows have been reviewed, and there have been some controversies—about its de-accession policies, about the museum's attitude toward art taken from Jewish collectors during the Holocaust—which museum officials have responded to quickly and vigorously, as if they were making points in a political campaign. The silence to which I am referring is not the silence of the press; it is the silence of the most fervent artists and museumgoers—the men and women who have for decades been the museum's core constituency. These people still pay a visit to the Museum of Modern Art now and again, to see a new show or to look at an old favorite in the permanent collection; but they approach the museum without any particular hope that they are going to be moved by what they see, and when they leave they frequently express neither pleasure nor disappointment. The Museum of Modern Art, an institution that so many museumgoers experienced so personally, is now generally regarded as a faceless juggernaut."