Mausoleum of Modern Art

New York's famed Museum of Modern Art, the greatest such museum in the world, has just reopened after a 3-year hiatus in which it nearly doubled in size. It is immensely revealing.

For a start, the mere fact of who was picked to design it tells a lot. The architect is the Japanese Yoshio Taniguchi, chosen over a field of prominent Western modernists and post-modernists. Japan has never been a hotbed of modern art, and the collection contains very little Japanese art. But Japan was, of course, a hotbed of architectural minimalism centuries before Mies Van Der Rohe and Le Corbusier. It seems that when all is said and done, history has been no kinder to the ponderous philosophical claims of artistic modernism than to any other of the 20th century's great ideologies, and all we are left with is minimalism. And not even Western minimalism, as in the theoretically bristling pseudo-mathematical constructions of Peter Eisenman or the cocaine-slick nouveau riche flashiness of Richard Meier, but a contemporary version of a tradition that was mature when Colonial Williamsburg was new.

Minimalism is a perfectly valid artistic style with a history that goes back further than representational art. It should not be confused with the horrible lead-footed Teutonic abstractionism of most of its “modern” variant. If one responds to it at all, the new building is competently executed and pleasing in a cool, cerebral sort of way that creates a small Zen oasis in the middle of Manhattan’s frenzy. Its garden is even better than the old.

It does resemble a hundred expensive corporate headquarters around the world, many of them festooned with plaza-plop by the same artists displayed within, but then MOMA was born among the social elite, said goodbye to the garrets a long time ago, and has never been squeamish about the synthesis of modern art and modern capitalism. On opening day, the logo of the sponsor was so prominent that I began to instinctively think of the place as "JPMorganChaseMOMA," which I suppose, on some level, it is.

But it is so utterly, pristinely, virginal of the slightest whiff of aesthetic innovation that it confesses what savants have known for going-on 35 years: modern art is as dead as the wooly mammoths in the natural history museum, and as needful of being packed into well-lit glass display cases for comfortable preservation. The cat, in other words, is finally out of the bag, after having been proclaimed by serious philosophers of art like Arthur Danto since about 1970. This is the mausoleum of modern art.

The average culture-vulture reading the Arts & Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times, let alone her epigones munching canapés at gallery openings in Atlanta and San Diego, hasn't exactly cottoned onto this. So the aesthetic-industrial complex rolls on, the venerated idea of the avant-garde helping to gentrify neighborhoods and enable yuppies to distinguish themselves from rednecks coast-to-coast. But the game is over, and it is a joke for such people to congratulate themselves on being "advanced" enough to like modern art. It isn’t 1919 anymore, and modernism is no longer a shocking innovation in a world of cultural norms intact enough for their violation to constitute a vandal, but still authentic, thrill.

But they will have to face the truth sooner or later. Grandpa's Weimar-era clichés are not going to be able to pretend they are the latest thing forever. Worse, the great pretender to the modernist throne, postmodernism, has utterly failed to take up modernism's banner as the essential cultural expression of advanced humanity. Despite launching wildly histrionic gesture after gesture in the sphere of architecture, in art it has only managed to endlessly recycle technically hypertrophied later mannerist neo-Dada, to use the precisely correct art historical terminology. The Shock of the New has given way to the numbing familiarity of the ceremonial Violating of the Taboos, as if art were an angry pagan god needing an endless supply of sacrificial virgins to be palliated.

Art schools are well-organized to supply these virgins, but one can’t help but feel sorry for the earnest black-clad youth wandering the galleries. They seek holy relics of a revolution that has long since ossified into the new establishment and a cutting edge that was blunt before most of them were born. But the sheer idea of being avant-garde is so entrancing that they cling to it long after the utter hegemony of modernity in our culture has made it impossible to be avant of anything with such quaint equipment as easel and brush.

Don’t misunderstand: the people who run MOMA are not stupid. They realized they couldn't take their standard-defining 20th century collection down the rabbit hole of postmodernism without sacrificing it. Thus they decided long ago not to try to keep the museum endlessly new and didn’t assemble a great collection of postmodern art. They bought, as a corporation might buy out an innovative competitor, the postmodern PS1 Art Center, but kept it firmly in its industrial wasteland on the wrong side of the river from Manhattan.

Postmodern architects were considered for the expansion: Rem Koolhaas, Koolhaas imitator Bernard Tschumi, Steven Holl. But at the end of the day, it was just too clear that making the Museum of Modern Art tacitly into the Museum of Postmodern Art would be a leap into incoherence. Worse, that leap might not land on anything solid at all, but on the unreliable reputation of a postmodernism that may in the end be judged by history as no more than the decadent phase of modernism. Given that modernism above all longed, in its purity and loathing of the rotting excesses of late-19th-century art, to not be decadent, that would be a problem. Too much money and too many reputations have been invested in MOMA to risk it all on such a gamble. Despite the cutting-edge pose it maintains for suburbanites determined to expose their children to “serious” art lest they grow up putting Velvet Elvises on their walls, MOMA is a conservative investor. It must preserve its blue-chip portfolio from dilution by the artistic equivalent of dot-com stocks.

This is, of course, the real key: MOMA is not fundamentally about art at all, but about cultural authority and who has it – i.e. the money and the collection to pull off its astringent demonstrativeness of what constitutes modern taste and what doesn't. When mere money has palled and political power bores, cultural power is the last prize the elite reaches for, if only to distinguish the serious haute-bourgeois from the Lear Jet rabble. Thus derives MOMA’s redeeming virtue: its ability to say “yes” and “no” to things, to reassert the necessary concept of cultural hierarchy, even if measured by the warped standards of modernism. It denies that anything goes. Such relativistic horrors, with their attendant descent into Blade-Runner multiculturalism, are postmodern and clearly do not belong on these antiseptic walls.

MOMA’s board is blue-chip; most of its members would be equally plausible running any of its sponsoring corporations. It is no accident artistic modernism has congealed into the official style, the tractor art, of corporate globalism. Its new HQ is nothing so much as the Lenin's Tomb of Modern Art, where the once-revolutionary object is embalmed for eternity so its inheritors can pose on top of it and remind the masses wherefrom their authority derives. (Not to mention remind themselves that they are a conquering elite that overthrew, with Freudian glee, the elite that came before.) The most honest part of MOMA, my favorite part, has always been its store, where one can buy forks and furniture confident they conform to the aesthetic standards proclaimed correct. Thankfully, it remains unchanged. Somebody, somewhere, can’t help telling the truth.

"When mere money has palled and political power bores, cultural power is the last prize the elite reaches for, if only to distinguish the serious haute-bourgeois from the Lear Jet rabble."

Ahh... The emperor's new clothes are beautiful!

I got dragged to see the Mondrian show at MOMA a few years back. I've seen better patterns on a bedspread at Walmart.

NOTHING is as hideous as the excrement they show at the Guggenheim. The building is a-s ugly too and a blight on the East Side.

For me the big three are the Met, The Cloisters (part of the Met, I know!), and the Frick. I would add the Whitney if they would steal Hopper's Nighthawks from Chicago and make their collection of the greatest artist of the 20th century complete.

I've never been to the Guggenheim, or the Whitney.

The Whitney did some pretty despicable things a few years back, in connection with their biennials. But, taking your recommendation, maybe I will check them out one day.

There really is nothing like the Frick, I only went there once, but will definately go back. A unique experience, and they've got great stuff in there.

I liked the MOMA the one or two times I was there. I'll never forget seeing "Guernica". Not a big Picasso person, but his stuff is better in real life, I found Guernica quite powerful, as they say.

Ah, I'm feeling rather inspired. This is going to be my first summer of freedom, since the kid is "all grown up", not really but at least in college. I thought it would be last summer, but due to some extreme craziness at my job, and also it being the kid's last summer BEFORE college (which included a party thrown by me), it just didn't work out. THIS summer I will go to these great Museums and soak it all in.

Nothing beats the Met though, it just can't be beat.

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