NY’s Museum of Modern Art is getting a PC makeover
This news may not be of any interest to you, but it’s of interest to me, because of the fondness I bear in my heart for the old MoMA, the one that existed before I was aware it even had the nickname “MoMA.” I went there as a young child and teenager, and it was a magical place, full of bright white walls and colorful—sometimes familiar and famous—modern paintings.
In the late 50s and the 60s, the time I’m talking about, the paintings there were indeed rather new, even the old ones such as impressionists—“new” compared to now, anyway. And they were the paintings and sculptures one learned about in classes about modern art, the modern art canon, as it were. Who determined what was included in this canon? Why, art historians, and to a certain extent the art market as it later developed (which was hardly independent of art historians and often had a built-in time lag; think of the struggling finances of Van Gogh, for example).
Who decides these things now? It’s still art historians, curators, and the like, I suppose. But now PC considerations are enormous in the art world, as in so many other arenas. So this is what MoMA (which recently got an absolutely huge influx of funds from donors) is planning:
As the Museum of Modern Art begins the final stage of its $400 million overhaul, it will close for four months this summer and autumn to reconfigure its galleries, rehang the entire collection and rethink the way that the story of modern and contemporary art is presented to the public.
The Picassos and van Goghs will still be there, but the 40,000 square feet of additional space will allow MoMA to focus new attention on works by women, Latinos, Asians, African-Americans and other overlooked artists like Shigeru Onishi, a Japanese experimental photographer, or Hervé Télémaque, a Haitian-born painter who is now 81.
If the comments to the article are any indication, a lot of people are unhappy about it, although some are pleased. My opinion? I haven’t been to that museum in many moons, and the last time I was there (about 15 years ago?) it was very crowded and filled with people taking cellphone photos of the famous pictures of their choice. I remember thinking that the whole experience was a falling-off from the memories of my youth, but I wasn’t really sure why and I didn’t spend all that much time there.
But “modern art” obviously didn’t stop with the 50s and 60s, so the museum probably needs to keep pace with the last few decades to be “modern” (otherwise it would need to rename itself). Whether “modern” in that sense is “good” is another story. I mostly detest what I know of most recent art, whether it be from the West or any other place on earth, although I must say that, with what I know of recent art in the West, recent art in other countries might actually be better on the whole.
I am largely unfamiliar with modern art around the world today, but my guess is that a lot of it might follow the obscure and sometimes repellent characteristics of recent art in the West. My strong impression of the latter is that most people do not go to look at it at all, and if they do it’s not with any joy.
MoMA is also planning to disperse this art around and sprinkle it into and among the older works. At least, I think that’s what this means:
Three floors of exhibition space will retain a spine of chronology, but the museum will now mix media, juxtaposing painting, sculpture, architecture, design, photography, performance, film and works on paper.
“A new generation of curators is discovering the richness of what is in our collection, and there is great work being made around the world that we need to pay attention to,” said Glenn D. Lowry, director of the museum. “It means that the usual gets supplanted now by the unexpected.”
Sounds like a jumbled mess to me. But I’m willing to wait and see; it could surprise me.
I’ve visited other museums in recent years and noticed how much PC thought has taken over, not necessarily in the exhibits (although that has happened, as well) but in the text that accompanies them. Same for zoos, by the way. It’s all about the progressive message.
PC = progressive corruption, progressive confusion, politically congruent, politically correct… Pro-Choice.
I recently toured the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. There’s a modern art wing, where there was a smallish display of early twentieth-century art. That was nice. The rest of the “modern” wing, in my opinion, is a waste of space. If I want wallpaper, I’ll buy some.
As you can tell, I am not an artist or an art critic.
If MoMA starts putting in recent art, then they are no longer “Modern” in the sense that word is used in academic art circles. They will be contemporary. “Modern Art” ceases around 1980.
the museum will now mix media, juxtaposing painting, sculpture, architecture, design, photography, performance, film and works on paper.
I don’t like much contemporary art, and I go and see it only to please my wife. But my biggest bugbear is when they have noisy film/performance/etc pieces that permeate the space. Instead of being able to look at what you want to look at in peace, you are assailed by the noise of some (invariably terrible) multi-media work in the preceding and following rooms. That most museums are open plan without restrictive doorways just makes it worse.
No museums pipe in music, because that would be considered gauche and distract from the art. Yet having to listen to someone yell a phrase over and over again as a “work” is apparently OK.
i remember once PBS showed an American Indian ballet.
im sure that the new exhibits in the MoMA will be just as good.
I believe that there are people who still rue the first “makeover”, in particular what was done to the original sculpture garden (if I remember correctly—a special space, a aesthetic oasis in mid-town Manhattan) as well as the original facade.
Is it a betrayal? Is it progress? (Maybe it’s impossible not to be both….)
The original building was such an iconic, groundbreaking, beautifully-conceived structure. It exuded modernity.
But what is a museum supposed to do if it needs a whole lot more display space? And the times they do a’change. Always.
It’s a touchy topic. (Make that an explosive topic.)
Not news in the conventional sense. Modern=Dreck.
And we are expected to bow down on bended knee before “art”. Said “art” does NOT include the historically great pieces of past centuries.
See how secondary schools whether public or private emphasize “art”…art as indoctrination.
It is a means to achieve our subjugation.
Whenever I’m in Boston I visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum and its great collection.
But recently that museum added a quite sterile, architecturally, “modern” wing, reducing the impact of Isabella’s home as its own museum as per her will. Done by its insurrectionist Board of Directors, Leftists all, I’m sure.
Here’s something you can do with museums specializing in contemporary art.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9x86Ind880
And here’s something you can do with the bloody curators and donors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifmRgQX82O4
About 15 years ago, I took my daughter London and she wanted to see The Tate Modern.
I am not a fan of Modern art but my favorite was a piece of wood about 2 feet long that had nails driven into it in the outline of a fish. Wound around the nails was string that looked like what my mother bought in ball shaped windings. I wondered who was responsible for replacing the string.
Ah. Modern art. Another great cultural disaster which I mourn even more than the loss of soul music.
The art critic, Robert Hughes, summed it up best in his 1980 BBC series, “The Shock of the New,” which is available in its entirety on YouTube. For anyone wishing to get a handle on modern art, I give this my highest recommendation.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=shock+of+the+new
For the TL;DR, here’s two minutes from the concluding episode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXGbyjUMjNE
_______________________________________
I don’t think there has ever been such a rush towards insignificance in the name of the historical future as we’ve seen in the last 15 years. The famous radicalism of sixties and seventies art turns out to be a kind of dumbshow. A charade of toughness. A way of avoiding feeling.
And I don’t think we are ever again obliged to look at a plywood box or a row of bricks on the floor or a videotape of some twit from the University of Central Paranoia sticking pins in himself and think, “This is the real thing. This is the necessary art of our time. This needs respect.”
Because it isn’t and it doesn’t and nobody cares.
–Robert Hughes, “The Shock of the New”
Episode 8: “The Future That Was [End of Modernity]”
Sadly the Hughes documentary did nothing to stop modern art’s “rush towards insignificance.” Modern art has remained stuck mildly embroidering the experiments of Duchamp and Warhol for over fifty years.
Nonetheless, a quarter of century later (2004) Hughes updated his series with a single episode titled, “The New Shock of the New,” in which Hughes chronicled the further decline of art into fashion and big money, then sought, a bit desperately, for a few sparks of real art in the present which might be catch fire and return art in the 21st Century to its duties.
“Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
“there is some shit I will not eat””
I wrote a somewhat relevant post a long time ago about a very strange art exhibit I went to in Brooklyn in the waning years of the 20th century.
I first saw the MoMA in the late 60’s when I was a pre-teen. (And a couple times in later years.) I also remembered the building; and the Picasso’s and especially the Cezanne’s from back then.
The most memorable from then was the Gaston Lachaise sculpture, Standing Woman in the courtyard. Now that’s a powerful woman! After staring at the torso for a couple minutes, I finally noticed the very muscular arms. Now, with the Interweb, the page tells us that the sculptor’s model or inspiration was his girlfriend who he later married.
There is an argument that ‘modern’ art – and the art market itself – is just a big money laundering scheme. Since there is no intrinsic value to it, either technical or contextual – its worth is a function of whatever someone is willing to pay for it. And where does all that money really end up?
This makes a lot more sense to me than most modern art!
Tom Wolfe wrote a book called “The Painted Word” where he pointed out that the art world is dominated by a few critics and their very wealthy patrons who know nothing. The result is a market that reflects the tastes of the very twisted critics and not the tastes of the general public who have more good sense than to accept nails in a log as art. It’s worth a read.
I long ago found a little website maintained by an inn keeper in England that documents his interest in the many European artists who are very good but not well known. Try it, ypu’ll like it.
https://mydailyartdisplay.wordpress.com
Mixing ’em up is a bad idea. I read an art book that arranged the artists alphabetically, and the effect was of jolts, not of harmonious contrast.
In my school signage for single stall unisex washrooms were changed to “gender neutral.” Because ya can’t forget about those who don’t see/feel that they’re not binary. My supervisor said it was all about keeping’ up with what federal policy says. If federal policy says jump on one foot because it makes historically maligned groups feel included then you must or else.
Oh and then there’s Black History Month at my school as well. There are some staff members who where African tribe garb but I wonder how many actually been to any country within Africa that isn’t called South Africa. The school offers trips to Europe but none to Africa that I know of. But ya know, Black Pride and whatever.
Ten or so years ago I saw a video from a guy in Britain opposing the EU. One of the things he was claiming was that those pushing the merger with the EU were behind the emergence of grotesque art in public places in Britain as part of a broader effort to make Britains not be proud of their own culture. Conspiracy theory or not, it makes sense that part of tearing down a nation internally might involve creating the illusion that there is nothing good from within that nation and thus it need not be preserved…..
I have thought for a long time that “American” art is not what is in a gallery, but what people are willing to buy and hang on their walls in their own house.
I have thought for a long time that “American” art is not what is in a gallery, but what people are willing to buy and hang on their walls in their own house.
jon baker: I learned of the self-made Scottish artist, Jack Vettriano, from the walls of a friend’s house. Vettriano started working in coal mines when he was 16. He started teaching himself to paint at 21. He’s been quite successful because regular people like his work, as well as collectors such as Jack Nicholson.
Not surprisingly, Vettriano doesn’t ride any avant-garde hobby horses. His work is representational and features the human form front and center. Some call it sentimental — it is easy on the eyes and somewhat romantic — but I think there is a mystery to his work somewhat like Edward Hopper’s.
Needless to say, Vettriano is trashed by art critics as “brainless” and “not even an artist.” With enemies like that I’m happy to enjoy his work. See what you think:
http://www.vettriano-art.com/the-singing-butler/
http://www.vettriano-art.com
Neo’s a New Englander, so I’m sure she knows all about that other repository of questionable taste and wasted paint, the Museum of Bad Art (MoBA) in Somerville, MA. MoBA bills itself as “the world’s only museum dedicated to the collection, preservation, exhibition, and celebration of bad art in all its forms.”
You can browse the various MoBA collections here: http://museumofbadart.org/collections/
The MoBA Sports Section and the MoBA Zoo are particularly worth checking out when you need a good laugh.
“Who determined what was included in this canon?”
Actually I think in the 1950s and 60s Popular Taste had an influence, if only indirectly. The Impressionists, Picasso and Matisse remain popular to this day. This is certainly not the case for the art presented to the public by curators, historians and the art market over the past few decades.
PA Cat on February 6, 2019 at 12:49 am at 12:49 am said:
Neo’s a New Englander, so I’m sure she knows all about that other repository of questionable taste and wasted paint, the Museum of Bad Art (MoBA)
* * *
MoBA is to Art what the Babylon Bee is to Religion and the Onion to Mainstream News Media.
Sometimes you can’t tell the fake stuff from the real.
Paul & huxley – thanks for the links – it’s a good day whenever you can learn something new and interesting that isn’t political.
One of our sons had to take Art classes as part of his college major (he specializes in jewelry and metal work) and I got very tired of his complaints about the dreck the teachers tried to push on the students, and even force them to make themselves.
I am an unrepentant fan of representational art, although there are some individual abstract works that I like, and I have no great empathy with Modern Art, but the contemporary stuff makes the MA look good.
Most of the modern art looks like a jumbled mess to me, so I find it appropriate that the presentation is congenial to content.
To be accurate shouldn’t they rename themselves to the Museum of post-Modern Art?
To be accurate shouldn’t they rename themselves to the Museum of post-Modern Art?
Tuvea: That’s not bad!
Modern art — from, say, 1910-1970 — was pretty solid stuff IMO. I’ll even defend Andy Warhol to a point. But since then art has disappeared into fashion, money, status and postmodernism.
_______________________________________________
The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It’s not something that committees can do. It’s not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It’s done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.
–Robert Hughes, “The Shock of the New”
“This news may not be of any interest to you, but it’s of interest to me”
I might surprise you. I can tell my Monets from my Manets. Every Friday in the Summer the Dallas Museum of Art used to host a piano player and serve wine. There was nothing more pleasant than wandering around listening to classical music drinking a decent wine and looking at the art.
I, who will happily gut a wild hog, appreciating the finer things. Actually, hunting leads to many of the finer things. You haven’t lived until you’ve eaten fresh deer or impala liver.
It’s depressing though not surprising just how PC the art world now openly is. It’s long been gutless. I’m going to be sensifive as this isn’t my web site. It’s yours, Neo. Whatever appears here is whatever you are willing to allow. The art world will produce Elephant Dung Mary, the movie Dogma, The play Book of Mormon. But Southpark gets a death threat when the news leaks out that they’re going to produce a show featuring Muhammad and they call it off.
There’s a video of Ben Affleck, who starred in Dogma, on Bill Maher’s show. I’m not a fan of Maher, but I have to give credit where credit’s due. He’s not afraid to tell the truth about Islam. I suppose I have to do the usual disclaimers and point out that Muslim does not equal terrorist. I know a lot of Muslims and they’re fine people. But the way they live their lives, which if we are to believe the historical legend (I do not believe that story we get about Muhammad has any valid historicity) is far better than their prophet. But just like most Christians not turning the other cheek doesn’t mean it’s not in the New Testament, the fact that most Muslims aren’t waging Jihad doesn’t mean it isn’t in the Quran or the Sunnah.
I am so, so cool with the fact that most of the 1.6 billion Muslims refuse to believe their own scripture.
But I’m watching Ben Affleck pretending his Stockholm Syndrome is some sort of virtue and I’m thinking we’re doomed if we’re just going to give up like this. I’ve been studying Islam since the 1980s. I keep getting told I’m taking it out of context. No, I’m not. After 30 plus years I can give you all the context you want. Historical context, direct textual context, overall scriptural context, how much context do you want? It sounds bad initially, and the more you look into the context the worse it gets.
So now I’m a racist. Because Islam is all of a sudden a race. A group of Albanian Muslims planned an attack on Fort Dix, NJ. I’m Italian. Albania is just a short boat ride across the Adriatic from my family’s old country. If I was standing next to an Albanian in a police line up you couldn’t tell who was who. But because he’s Muslim now he’s a different race? There are Catholics from Botswana to Siberia. How come we don’t get our own race?
I want to make it clear. I don’t hate Muslims. Hate is an expensive emotion and neither you or I can afford it. It clouds the mind. But on the other hand when some Muslim blows himself up in a market I tend to believe he’s sincere. “We may never know the motive.” Seriously? Now we don’t believe confessions?
Oh, they’re perverting a great religion. The Quran commands Muslims to model themselves after their prophet. According to the ahadith (plural of the Arabic hadith, which means report, and the ahadith now comprise the major portion of the Sunnah) when Muhammad attacked the Jewish Oasis of Khaybar he tortured one of the significant men of the village nearly to death because Muhammad learned the man was concealing the community’s treasure. So he ordered a fire be built on his chest until he gave up the location. Then he handed the man, Kinana, off to one of his companions whose brother had been killed in not much of a battle. After which Muhammad raped his widow, Safiya.
“Khaybar, Khaybar, Ya Yahud! Jaish Muhammad Sawfa Ya’ud!”
Remember Khaybar, O Jews. The Army of Muhammad is returning.
Truth matters. We’re now hearing this chant in the United States of America. Are we really united? If I can back up everything I’m saying, can I say it here?
Surah 2:223
“Your wives are a place of sowing of seed for you, so come to your place of cultivation however you wish and put forth [righteousness] for yourselves. And fear Allah and know that you will meet Him. And give good tidings to the believers.”
Does a field get to have a say about when and how the farmer plows it? Linda Sarsour is running around claiming Islam is supremely feminist. No it’s not. Somebody nees to refute that. Guess it’s me. If you want context after the Hijra it turned out the women in Yathrib (now Madina) weren’t comfortable having sex in all the positions the Meccan men expected. So after one of Madinan women refused to have sex with one of Muhammad’s disciples, the disciple went to the “prophet” and got a revelation.
She’s your field. Do what you want.
Linda Sarsour can say what she wants. I’ll believe Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
I went there as a young child and teenager, and it was a magical place, full of bright white walls and colorful—sometimes familiar and famous—modern paintings. –Neo
You might even have turned around and found Salvador Dali leaning on his elegant cane. What a mustache. : ) The good old days, eh?
Tuvea on February 6, 2019 at 9:47 am at 9:47 am said:
To be accurate shouldn’t they rename themselves to the Museum of post-Modern Art?
* * *
How about the Museum of Quasi-Art, or QuasiMoMA.
It’s a bit unwieldy, but how about the Museum of Modern, Contemporary, and Post-Modern Political Art?
Is there any “art” left in it? Beauty left long ago.
Reading this post made me think of this guys comment on Modern Art.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN9iJCZ5Il8
And stick to the end of the video he gives an example of a really good Modern Artist.
Is there any “art” left in it? Beauty left long ago.
om: A friend recommended the exercise of browsing through a book on contemporary art and looking for the word, “beauty.”
One is not surprised.
Huxley:
But there may be some truth in it? Or just a whole lot of ugly?
My last trip to MoMA was 20 years ago where I viewed 3-2×4 pieces of wood about 30″ long nailed together, crudely painted white with most of the nails bent over hanging on a piece of silas rope from the ceiling…. Hell, I was doing that kind of Art when I was 4 years old…It was a little before the time for this kind of Art….Dang!! Maybe it was the same artist that Mike referred to at 5:49
Huxley- yes, that seems like real art. My grandmother started painting nature scenes , flowers and that sort of thing around 70 ish years old. There are a number hanging around the house.
Maybe MoMA will sponsor this one when it leaves DC.
https://libertyunyielding.com/2019/02/04/interactive-art-solution-pelt-ivanka-trump-with-crumbs/
But there may be some truth in it? Or just a whole lot of ugly?
om: Mixed.
Modern art, at least into the seventies, wasn’t necessarily stupid or insincere. I still see much of it as heroic. The 20th century was such a dislocation for everything that focusing on beauty while confronted with automobiles, relativity, world wars, nuclear weapons, television, computers and moonshots seemed inadequate.
I take that point. Artists like Picasso, Braque, Duchamp, Klee, Magritte, Dali, Miro, Pollock, Rothko, Johns, Rauschenberg and even Warhol strike me as essential. I find much of their work, however cock-eyed, beautiful without pursuing that quality directly.
But at some point, the avant-garde spirals into itself and self-destructs or is co-opted by commercial and political concerns. Which is what we have seen.
What I find unforgivable is that current artists are simply recycling modern art tropes within criminally unexamined postmodern assumptions.
My last trip to MoMA was 20 years ago where I viewed 3-2×4 pieces of wood about 30? long nailed together, crudely painted white with most of the nails bent over hanging on a piece of silas rope from the ceiling…
John Dough: I saw something similar in 1974. A 2×8 painted blue and displayed leaning against a white museum wall. The title:
There’s no reason not to
I give the sculptor credit for deconstructing everybody.
huxley on February 7, 2019 at 12:33 am at 12:33 am said:
…I saw something similar in 1974. A 2×8 painted blue and displayed leaning against a white museum wall. The title:
There’s no reason not to
I give the sculptor credit for deconstructing everybody.
* * *
I got my BS in 1974 and remember similar works displayed in the college art gallery, and I wondered, “Where’s the Art?”
At the time, I had not heard about deconstruction, post-modernism, “critical theory” and their ilk (STEM major), and PC was not yet a “thing” — I wonder if the art world was in advance of the political wave or surfing it?