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...