Jason FaragoVerifizierter Account

But it’s as if we’ve exchanged one problem for another. Once we had noncomprehensiveness as a prejudice; now we have noncomprehensiveness as an insufficiency. This, really, is the task: to imagine a “comprehensive” collection that still has a shape, and isn’t just Google.

Temkin’s response, in the new display, is to unwind the whole idea of “gaps.” The new hang is so unstable that speaking of “missing pieces” makes no sense. And that is hugely exciting in places.

If MoMA is buying Tarsila, should it also buy Ruhlmann? Or, say, Chanel? If it buys Charles White, should it also buy prewar figurative drawing? And if it’s buying (I don’t know) contemporary Albanian painting, should it also buy socialist realism?

For example, a new gallery called “Paris in the 1920s” includes Tarsila do Amaral alongside Léger, and Eileen Gray with Corb. Great. But what you won’t find, what they don’t own, is Art Deco. That’s MoMA! Yet whole eras, whole nations, intersect with some stylistic lacunae…

…and here things get tricky. MoMA is, decidedly, not a universal museum. It has strong stylistic proclivities (above all in architecture and design). What happens to those proclivities as you globalize a collection? Can you have a better asymptote than “one of everything”?

Methodologically, the enigma of the new MoMA for me is what Ann Temkin calls “the whole world problem.” A lot will be said about wider demographic representation (and rightly so!). But the more you correct for oversights of people, the more you highlight oversights of style…

I have much more to say. This is a reported feature, not a review; my fellow critics and I will weigh in throughout October. But I want to say this now: the new MoMA wagers on reaching wider audiences and higher aims THROUGH the core program. I hope (I believe?) they're right.

The best news is this: the topline of the new MoMA is collection, collection, collection. Where some museums have pivoted to soft amusements, MoMA has expanded, rediscovered and globalized what it owns. The 11 inaugural shows are all collection shows. It's kind of intimidating!

"When you make a work that interacts directly with the public, some people see it as a kind of contempt. As if you're speaking condescendingly.... But children, for example, or people who know nothing about the art market, respond spontaneously, naturally, to these works."

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