New York Diary

Museum Showdown!

Last Friday, I went to the Museum of Modern Art here in New York. (Allow me an unsolicited shout-out to Target and its free Friday MOMA nights!) I love the Met's historical bent, it's archaeological and cultural exhibits, and the expansiveness of its collection--but I hereby pronounce MOMA to be hands-down far, far better than the Metropolitan. Taken as a whole, MOMA's collection is much stronger then the sometimes-it-seems-like-they're-just-hoarding collection at the Met. Architecturally and spatially, MOMA's building is lovely, a truly successful marriage of form and function. And, most incomprehensibly, the curation at MOMA is so much better than the curation at the Met that it borders on the embarrassing. The Met should be ashamed. MOMA has converted me.

"Modern art" is always a little hit-or-miss. I confess to being unconvinced by Martin Creed's Work No. 227, The Lights Going On And Off (the curatorial note at this link is uncharacteristically bombastic and horrible, I would like to note). I am a fan Mark Rothko, but would say that some other adherents of the color-field movement are more provocative than painterly. Negotiating the difficult space of modern and contemporary art must be like walking a precipitous ledge: the view is amazing, but if you make a mistake, it's sure to be a doozy.

Maybe this helps to explain the fantastically good collection at the MOMA. There's a lot of deplorably poor "contemporary art" out there, but very little of it in this museum--indeed, the works at MOMA are almost consistently top-notch and moving. The Met can buy a painting from a 16th century minor artist and not be ridiculed ("not as good as a Da Vinci, but still a nice little addition to our collection"), but MOMA simply can't get away with buying modern art that's not particularly good--because it is so obviously, so clearly not particularly good. In consequence, the Met's collection, taken on the whole, simply can't hold a candle to the collection at the MOMA.

But even if it could, the MOMA is smarter. If the Met is about knowledge and learning--here's how a Baroque artist would have learned perspective; here's the story that's being told on that Egyptian roll of papyrus; here's a crucifixion whose significance you won't truly understand unless you know that this is the wheel of St. Catherine, that that's St. Stephen with the arrows in him, not to mention the whole of New Testament Biblical history--then the MOMA is about thinking. It is no coincidence that it was the MOMA that made the mistake of giving Creed a forum for his inane on-again, off-again overhead lights; indeed, The Lights Going On And Off is in some ways an inherently thinking-man's work. It provokes conversation and consideration of artistic merits--even if it oversteps an indefinite boundary and leads all and sundry to conclude that, no, it's not any good, and, no, it's not art either.

The very different "knowing" and "thinking" models of art museums are both entirely viable, though perhaps almost mutually exclusive. There certainly are successful ways to approach the contextual project that characterizes the Met; to be sure, I love the opportunity that such a large and varied collection presents to immerse oneself in 14th Century Poland, or Middle Kingdom Egypt, or the Byzantine Empire, or even something so recent as fin-de-siecle France. If the Met wanted to make the most of its collection for the public, it would have curatorial notes that explained the context, relevance, and symbolism of its works--and this should be not just a cursory or obvious explanation ("This 17th Century crucifixion features a wounded Christ"--I mean, duh, I can see that by looking at the picture). Texts in other languages should be translated. A coin on a shelf should be labelled not simply "Coin with Justinian's Head," but should include some sense of who Justinian was, who might have made the coin, why it's an impressive piece of metalwork, and why it's phenominally interesting that this particular coin was dug up in China (which, as it is today, might not even be mentioned at all). A Metropolitan Museum for smart non-specialists needs to embrace context in a way that it emphatically does not do today.

The MOMA, by contrast, has a far lesser need for this kind of curatorial note (though that need is not entirely absent). For a couple of reasons, the works in that institution are less context-specific than those in the Met: first, we are more likely to be familiar with the world in which a contemporary piece was created (nobody needs an expert to explain the cultural significance of Maralyn Monroe or Campbell's Soup when trying to figure out what Andy Warhol was doing), so we don't need nearly as much coaching to see what's going on; and second, the works are far less likely to have been created for practical or useful reasons (a functional altarpiece, a coat of mail, a tomb, a table), the knowledge of which might give us a much greater appreciation of the object in question. What the MOMA does need are notes which, like many of the pieces within its walls, are thought-provoking. Both kinds of curation are trying to explain what's going on in a work of art--but what's going on in some art is primarily contextual, a question of story and style, while what's going on in some other art is primarily theoretical, a question of ideas and emotions.

So when I say that the MOMA is "smarter" than the Met, what I mean is this: its curatiorial notes succeed in making its works intelligently interesting in a way that the Met's notes do not. They explain what is going on, why the work is controversial (or much-loved or whatever), and why we should care about preserving it. To some extent, to be sure, the MOMA does this out of self-defense; nobody asks the Met to justify the inclusion of a 13th century figurative painting in the permanent collection, but we all want to know why an empty room or a monochromatic blue canvas gets to be included in a collection of the world's greatest artistic masterpieces. But this fact aside, MOMA's notes are well-researched and thought-provoking, and show a real consideration of the worth of the museum's pieces.

This curatorial consideration is extended beyond notes on the works and into the organization and structure of exhibits, as well. Curation at the Met is lazy. Curation at MOMA is not. Galleries there are not the organized along the predictable "artist-region-year" vectors, but rather offer more carefully considered comparisons across artists and genres. Seeing Braques and Picasso side-by-side gives me a new appreciation for Picasso's superior ability not to lose the object of his paintings amid the complications of his Cubist style; looking at Chagall and Kandinsky in the same room is an exercise in how very different two works of similar colors, materials, and brush strokes can be; five sloping, modernist chairs presented together are just enough to consider their myriad differences and essential formal and practical similarities, without overwhelming a viewer to the point of saying, "Oh, look, it's yet another chair in this endless string of Chippendale chairs." Special exhibitions at MOMA are organized not by artist, but by theme. (The current special gallery is set aside for Out of Time, a look into the ways that art in its various forms has played with conceptions of time and historicity. It's the kind of exhibit that could coherently accomodate both Dali's Persistence of Memory and Warhol's Empire, a movie showing the Empire State building as it changes in real time). A room of architectural drawings and building schemata is introduced by a compelling statement on the way that the size of an architectural work affects--or is affected by--the subject matter; viewers are invited to note how the bigger pieces in the gallery generally show the outsides of buildings--the "artist's renditions" of various finished structures--while smaller sheets of paper were devoted to careful diagrams and building plans. This was not precisely an exhibit designed to show off the thesis presented at the beginning; rather, it was a case of a curator looking at the MOMA's collection of architectural work, noticing something interesting, and pointing it out to viewers to give us a guide as to how to look at the entirety of collected works. That's a fantastic curatorial model.

In fact, the only one-artist room that I found in the whole of the Museum of Modern Art, a room full of Jackson Pollocks, also offered excellent, thought-provoking juxtapositions. All of the pieces shared the same energy--perhaps we should say, "the same sense of urgency"--but some were far more representational than others, and each was quite distinct in character. To be sure, it was not a room of endless and poorly-connected Pollock drip paintings, the likes of which are so common at the Met. Instead, like the study in architecture several galleries over, the Pollock gallery provided a carefully curated set of inviting comparisons. It was great.

So there you are. I recall reading that the average tourist is several times more likely to visit the Met than they are to visit any other museum in New York City. Well, average tourist, now I'm talking to you. Go to the MOMA instead.

posted by Skay @ 7:14 PM