The newly redesigned Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City opened last November after a remodeling that took nearly two and a half years. The event was greeted by considerable civic excitement and, at least initially, public enthusiasm. Some critics responded with the literary equivalent of “oohs” and “ahhs” over the museum's new architecture. “Serene,” “transcendent,” and “exquisite” were a few of the adjectives one writer was moved to employ, while another proclaimed the building a “triumph of formal restraint and practical design.” Still another wrote of this “vastly enlarged institution” that it has been “saved from oppressive monumentality by its simplicity, lightness, and the elegance and ingenuity of its technological detailing.”

But if the reaction to the new MOMA as a feat of construction was mostly favorable, more than a few reviewers, including a fair number of those who praised the new building's architecture, identified serious shortcomings in the same building considered as a museum. In particular, they singled out the design and character of the interior space as a venue for looking at art, as well as the way the art from the museum's permanent collection was being presented in its new home. It may be too early to know how the art-going public will eventually feel about these two fundamental issues, but much of the critical response ranged from doubt and uncertainty to disappointment and regret—and not without reason.

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Some buildings are flawed on the outside. The trials and travails of the celebrated Frank Gehry, for example, seem only to grow with each new commission for one of his signature conglomerations of giant twisting metal curves. As the New York Times recently reported of the Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, a decision will have to be made “whether to sandblast portions of the building's shimmering façade of stainless steel to reduce its glare on motorists. . . . [C]onsultants found that the [reflected] rays [of the sun] irritate drivers and cause temperatures on nearby sidewalks to rise as high as 138 degrees.” “Other Gehry projects,” the Times continued, “have had similar problems. His . . . swirly building for the business school at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland has been likened to a tanning mirror and sent snow and ice sliding off the sloping stainless-steel roof onto the heads of pedestrians below.” Pretty much everyone has heard about the fate of the titanium exterior of Gehry's most famous structure, the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, which began to stain an unattractive brown not long after it was finished.

Since I have not yet had a chance to visit Gehry's buildings, I cannot speak to whether they are flawed from the inside as well. But it seems clear why his elaborate designs end up causing problems: they have sacrificed, to an unwise extent, one of the most important elements of a successful building, namely, functionality. Buildings should be beautiful, but they should also serve the purposes for which they have been built.

On the outside, the new MOMA is widely regarded as a success; the museum, as one observer put it, has “finally become part of the connective tissue of Manhattan.” That may be true, and it may even, from some perspective, be a good thing; but the inside of the new MOMA is another matter.

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Much has been made of the beautiful lines of the new MOMA, and there is no denying that, on the inside, the design in many ways creates a pleasing and comfortable space. The new layout, in the words of Glenn Lowry, MOMA's director, permits “a more open, less structured movement through the museum.” But if this is an example of the beauty of ultra-modern design, it is beauty of an anonymous and mundane kind, unrelated to the supposed purpose of the museum.

when a friend asked me after my first visit what the new MOMA was like, I instinctively replied, “It's like going to the Gap. I mean, one of the upscale Gaps.” However flip this may sound, I found no reason to modify my view after a second visit. The chief aesthetic quality of the new MOMA is a confident self-consciousness of its own sleek and lowkey style. The building is so “cool,” in fact, that, according to one news report, visitors are regularly confused about where the entrance is.

And this points to a big problem right off. Serious art museums do not exude a sense of their own style; traditionally, they are designed and constructed to serve the purpose of enabling visitors to look at works of art in a setting conducive to the reception of aesthetic pleasure. Ideally, the rooms through which one passes in a museum are simply there, accommodating and unobtrusive places where one's attention is, and can be, directed without impediment to the objects on display.

This is, I believe, true of all good art museums, whether the Gemaeldegalerie in Berlin, the Glyptotek in Copenhagen, or the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., to cite three examples that could not be more different in their style, their physical layout, and the scope of their collections. One museum may be charming, another austere, another stylishly grand, but once inside one should inevitably feel the pull of the paintings, sculptures, or other works in surroundings that do not compete with or overwhelm them.

Unfortunately, the new MOMA, which has essentially inverted the critical relationship between a museum building and its contents, fails this most crucial test. One might have expected, for example, that it would offer an improved showcase for the works it holds in its permanent collection. This has been the case with other recent remodelings, like that of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Instead, the art now plays second fiddle to the building; indeed, one cannot avoid the impression that the art now exists in order to adorn MOMA's new structure, whose raison d'être no longer revolves around the aesthetically educational display of paintings, sculptures, and other objects but rather around the building's understated but distinct desire to call attention to itself in a manner calculated to appeal to the broadest possible audience of upscale “consumers.”

The fact that ticket prices have been almost doubled to $20.00 is the first sign of this commercializing spirit. The second is the lobby of the new building, which could easily be mistaken for the lobby of a multiplex. Nothing indicates that one has entered a museum, not even the fact that there is artwork on the lobby walls. The paintings on display when I visited—Roy Lichtenstein's Artist's studio “The Dance” (a spoof of Matisse) at one end, Joan Miró's Mural Painting at another, and Ellsworth Kelly's Spectrum IV in between—seemed to be serving the purpose of filling up empty wall space; that is, they had been transformed into a kind of interior decoration.

This may not matter much in the cases of Lichtenstein and Kelly; the work of both men, though the former is pop and the latter abstract, is big and insubstantial. But in the case of Miró, it is very sad to see his great painting lost on a white wall too big for anything except perhaps a game of squash. The same sensation of anonymity pursues one throughout the museum. Take away the paintings, sculptures, and other objects, and you could, for all intents and purposes, be in an ultra-modern department store. With the extra high ceilings, the uncovered blond wood flooring, the bright white walls and the even brighter track lighting, you could also be in a contemporary gallery of the kind that always seems more suitable for socializing than for encounters with art.

The rooms in the old MOMA may have been smaller and even crowded, but once you were in them the art drew you into itself. The new MOMA goes a long way toward precluding this response. The fact that the rooms open into each other in a way that facilitates the movement of visitors—“allowing for a more nuanced, less linear sense of art history by encouraging serendipitous discoveries and juxtapositions,” to quote Lowry again—compounds this effect, since contemplating art actually calls for slowing down and stopping. After awhile, the design also creates a sense of disorganization, if not disorientation, if only because virtually every room seems to have more than one opening marked “Exit.” (One critic reported that the head of MOMA's department of architecture and design referred, favorably, to the new galleries' layout as “resembling the child's game Chutes and Ladders.”)

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The consequences for those who want to contemplate the art are apparent as one makes one's way through the building. Most critics, including some who otherwise found the building a marvel of design and execution, noticed this, and they had virtually the same thing to say about the experience of walking through the redesigned galleries. Here is Ada Louise Huxtable in the Wall Street Journal:

In the galleries, circulation displaces contemplation. With openings in three walls out of four in almost every room for a relentlessly revolving path . . . there is always something else insistently entering your peripheral vision. . . . What is missing is the quiet place where one can communicate directly and deeply with a single work or artist. At the new MOMA, there is no repose.

And here is Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times:

I could imagine a few more resting spots, places at which to look at a single picture with nothing else in one's field of vision. I remember what it used to be like at the museum. . . . [P]eople still want, and need, to feel themselves immersed in a painting, to commune with art in peace, in private—or at least to have the illusions of peace and privacy: they want to lose themselves, psychologically speaking, in the work.

And Hilton Kramer in the New York Observer:

[T]he galleries are essentially an architectural assemblage of—what else?—oversized white boxes in which the scale of the interior space and the unrelieved whiteness of the walls conspire to discomfort the viewer while diminishing the aesthetic integrity of works of art marooned in an environment remarkably hostile to the pleasures of the eye.

I have already mentioned the Miró in the lobby. In the huge second-floor space, which rises several stories high, Monet's massive Water Lilies is so lost on the wall it is virtually impossible to take in. Elsewhere one finds Matisse's Dance at the top of a large stairwell, and works by Richard Diebenkorn and Milton Avery at the bottom.

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Such awkward placement is a telltale indication, of something more than a failure to provide for the experience of contemplating art “in peace, in private,” as Kimmelman puts it. It is a sign of the diminished status that the new MOMA accords, in particular, to its great modernist paintings. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the fifth floor, the home of its core collection of 19th-and 20th-century masterpieces.

From the moment one sees Henri Rousseau's masterwork of modern “primitivism,” The Dream, hung like some anonymous decoration on the exterior wall of the fifth-floor café, one fears alike for the fate of the art and for the possibility of enjoying it; and as one moves through the rooms devoted to Matisse, Picasso, and other masters, one's heart sinks. As astonishing as it might sound, the café has been placed directly across from the entrance to these galleries; because it is open on both sides, the cacophony penetrates well into the first room, housing the works of Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and other key figures in the modern movement. Worse, the absence of carpeting and the “flow-through” design have the effect, not only of allowing the noise of the crowds to undulate from room to room, but, along with the bright lights and white walls, of actually seeming to encourage visitors to be noisy.

The Matisse room exemplifies the problem. Here one can find a group of the master's greatest paintings—among them, The Yellow Curtain, The Piano Lesson, The Blue Window, and The Red Studio—but the experience of trying to look at them, of engaging in genuine contemplation, is so intruded upon by the “social” atmosphere and the brilliant illumination—which overwhelms the color-created light of the paintings, making them looked washed out or veiled—that one begins to despair. Under such conditions, how can a viewer appreciate the beauty of, or try to analyze, Matisse's revolutionary use of color in composition? Or, elsewhere, immerse himself in the subtle and sensuous color harmonies of Bonnard's The Bathroom? Or delve into the pictorial mystery of Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror?

One reviewer quoted Yoshio Taniguchi, the architect of the new MOMA, as saying: “Raise a lot of money for me, I'll give you good architecture. Raise even more money, I'll make the architecture disappear.” Well, by all accounts he succeeded in doing that, to general acclaim; the only problem is that the design is making the greatest art in the collection begin to disappear as well.

In this way, it has also resolved the issue of what Lowry refers to as “the defining character of the museum,” giving us a building that not only manages to blur “the distinctions of feeling upon which the great modern painters had founded their art” (in the words of one critic) but that tends to render a visitor all but incapable of experiencing such distinctions—because he can no longer fully gain access to the art.

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An ability to make such distinctions is required in the first place of those who conceive the structures intended to house great art. Faced with a choice, those responsible for the new MOMA have created a building that is in tune not with the ethos of high modernism—the ethos that the museum was founded to express and to serve—but, it appears, with the very different spirit of the contemporary art scene. How did this happen?

Lowry's explanation of how the design expresses the new MOMA concept is revealing:

From the outset the Museum set several goals for its 53rd Street project—some practical, some more abstract. These included the need to find a way to conceive its space, rather than simply plan its architecture, so that the predictable order of the museum could engage with the unpredictable order of the city, while simultaneously recognizing the heightened challenge of mediating between the experience of the city and that of looking at art. In order to stay “modern,” the museum had to avoid becoming merely a treasure house or vault for its collection; it had to assert its commitment to contemporary art.

In part, then, the new MOMA is the consequence of a conscious effort to meet “the heightened challenge of mediating between the experience of the city and that of looking at art.” But the fact is that this goal—effected not only by the “flow-through” interior design but most pointedly by the device of placing floor-to-ceiling window slots at various points in the galleries offering pleasant views overlooking 53 rd and 54th Streets—could only be realized by degrading the environment for looking at art. And the striking thing about this stated goal is how eerily it parallels the creative impulse of so many contemporary artists, who themselves seek merely to replicate experience rather than coming to terms with it and thereby transforming it into art.¹

Admittedly, a good deal of contemporary art does still remain bound up with the modernist tradition (although the best seems often to be that which has received the least attention from museums). But a good deal is frankly anti-modernist—indeed anti-art—and a good deal more is parasitic upon both modern art and popular culture. The primary mode of feeling of much of this art is a deadening coolness—an emotional flatness or affectlessness.

One reviewer described the new MOMA as a combination of “gigantism and chilliness.” The term could also serve as a description of much contemporary art. For the contemporary era is not only one in which “novelty” and artistic technique have been glorified as ends in themselves, but one in which size, of all things, has become a measure of an art object's value.

The story is told of the art dealer who, on the basis of a photograph, sent a large truck to pick up a work by Picasso that turned out to measure less than two square feet. This story reveals something important about the visual power of a particular work of modernist painting, and also about the relation between scale and aesthetic intensity. Bigger-is-not-necessarily-better would seem an obvious truism; but the opposite dictum seems to have been guiding contemporary art for so long that it now seems almost passé.

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To get an idea of the impact the bigger-is-better aesthetic has had, consider the following: several years back, it was reported that a West Coast museum was going to knock a hole in one of its own exterior walls in order to accommodate an exhibition of the sculptor Richard Serra's huge curved forged-steel slabs (called Torqued Ellipses). Furthermore, according to the newspaper account, the giant sculptures themselves had to be transported by freighter through the Panama Canal, since they were too heavy to be shipped overland from the East Coast.

Such vexations have become increasingly common; indeed, the size of contemporary works of art has been raising serious cost questions for museums, which must, if they choose to accept or acquire such works, find a way to store and maintain them. But if one of the notable features of contemporary art has been its tendency to hugeness, few have seemed interested in asking why this should be so. My own view is that in many cases, size, or quantity, has become a compensating substitute for quality; in other words, an aesthetic value has been replaced by a commercial value. For evidence of this, one need only look at many of the objects that now fill the outdoor “sculpture gardens” of some of our museums.

The importance of this cannot be overstated. As it happens, the question of what to do with all the oversized contemporary art on hand was a central issue in determining MOMA's new concept and design. Glenn Lowry informs us of two options that were rejected in conceiving a museum that could “deal with the programmatic and physical needs of specifically contemporary art while retaining the ability to present a synoptic overview of the collection.” The first was “ceasing to collect contemporary art altogether”; the second was “establishing a separate museum for contemporary art.” The first, he says, was “never a serious possibility,” while the second “would have created more problems than it solved” by “establishing a division between the earliest and the most recent works in the collection.”

This last statement is never explained. What would have been wrong, after all, with recognizing the division (or divisions) between contemporary art and high modernism? On the face of it, and especially in light of the remodeled building that now stands shiny and new on West 53rd Street, the option of building a separate museum might have made a lot more sense. (Even the first option, halting the further purchase of contemporary art, might have been worth considering.) As it was, the decision was made to turn MOMA into the equivalent of such a museum, making the presentation of contemporary art, not the presentation of the core collection of modernist masterpieces, into MOMA's de-facto reason for being.

And this in turn dictated the new design, as Lowry frankly explains:

Taniguchi's most dramatic gesture . . . was to reverse the sequence of the collection galleries. . . . This choice of Taniguchi's simultaneously solved an engineering and a programmatic problem. By placing the contemporary galleries on the second floor, Taniguchi was able to get the high ceilings (21 feet) needed for the display of so much contemporary art, to free the space of columns, and to provide a sliding door so that oversized sculpture can be gantried in from the street, which would have been impossible on the fourth and fifth floors.

Two critical points emerge from this account. First, those involved in redesigning MOMA recognized, at least implicitly, the basic conflict involved in trying to have a museum that seeks to dedicate itself to both modern and contemporary art. Second, and notwithstanding some doubletalk about presenting “a more synthetic and complex overview of the early and current collection as a whole,” they resolved this tension in favor of contemporary art and at the expense of the museum's modernist masterpieces.

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That the choice was arrived at in order to make room for large pieces of contemporary art is, however, only part of the explanation. As Mr. Lowry points out, other options were available, and though he does not really tell us why they were rejected, one could speculate that part of the motivation was the fear that separating the two domains would be taken as a sign that MOMA officials did not judge contemporary art to be on a par with the modernist core collection. This would account for what some have seen as the most destructive aspect of the new MOMA, namely, its abandonment of the system for telling the story of modern art that was developed by the museum's first director, Alfred Barr. Hilton Kramer has described the fundamental nature of this shift, which entails a

systematic deconstruction of Barr's pioneering work in establishing a coherent, stylistically oriented history of modernist art. Barr created programs and diagrams that trace a succession of aesthetic influences and intellectual linkages . . . [and] his installations were based on this historical scenario.

What has categorically changed at MOMA is the way the museum presents works of art to the public. Heretofore, MOMA's presentation was largely based on [Barr's] formalist-historical model. . . . What we encounter . . . in the new MOMA are works of art that have been orphaned from . . . the aesthetic history from which they derive their ideas and from the history of their influence on later works of art.

In light of this profound transformation, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that what really lies behind the new MOMA design is a desire to facilitate a false equation of significance between modern and contemporary art. This is, after all, what is implied by the phrase “serendipitous juxtapositions” of the past and present. In fact, there was nothing serendipitous about the juxtapositions I saw on my visits; they were quite clearly contrived to suggest that various contemporary works of art do belong in the same room with, and are thus implicitly to be considered no less valuable or important than, masterpieces of the modern era.

MOMA has done this disservice to modernism—to the art, that is, that the museum was established to collect, preserve, and help the public understand—in order, as Lowry makes clear, to make a statement about its “commitment to contemporary art.” But the ultimate irony may be that contemporary art, as we know it, may be on its way out. One reviewer recorded his disappointment in finding that, in the new MOMA, Robert Rauschenberg's “combine painting,” Bed, “suddenly looks inconsequential and wan.” More importantly, the critic Peter Schjeldahl has asserted that

the present scale of [MOMA's] spaces . . . is already anachronistic, keyed to the four-decade-old, ever-wearier reign of post-minimalism: sprawling environmental works, conceptual theatrics, Richard Serra sculpture. Today's most captivating new art runs to sizes small and medium.

If Schjeldahl is right, the new MOMA may prove to be not just a failure but a folly.

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¹ For an elaboration of this point, see my article, “The Monotony of Sensation,” in the January 2000 COMMENTARY.

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