It was a little more than a decade ago, in 1984, that the Museum of
Modern Art
completed its last major expansion. That effort
lasted nearly four years, during most
of which time the museum was
closed or nearly so, with only a token representation of its
permanent collection being accessible to the public. The result of
this massive expansion was, as we noted at the time, a museum
designed “for a public nurtured on blockbuster
exhibitions–exhibitions that are as much media events as they are
art events, and that have the inevitable effect
of arousing, by
means of high intensity publicity campaigns, the kind of interest
which art in and of itself can probably never fully satisfy.” Hence
the prevalence of the museum-as-department-store design, above
all the exposed escalators to handle the greatly increased crowds
attracted as much by MOMA’s restaurant and atrium as by its
collection.

Now MOMA is about to embark on another major expansion—the largest
ever. At a recent press conference to announce the architect
entrusted with this latest building extravaganza, museum officials were
as ebullient as real estate developers unexpectedly presented with a
large parcel of Midtown land. Ronald S. Lauder, chairman of the
museum’s board of trustees, told the assembled press that the new
expansion was as exciting and important an event as the museum’s
opening at 11 West Fifty-third Street in 1929. (He meant 1939, but
what’s ten years among friends?) David Rockefeller
spoke about his “passionate belief” in the arts as a positive force
in society. And Glenn D. Lowry, the smooth-talking specialist in
Islamic art that MOMA recently appointed as its director, emitted
a Niagara of bureaucratese about the museum’s
need for
space, his effort “to find a way to vitalize the rich store embedded
in this institution,” etc.

Anyone who has wondered, as we have, why a museum of modern art should
have chosen someone whose expertise was in Islamic art as a director
need only have witnessed Mr. Lowry’s performance to understand the
choice. Clearly, he was chosen not for his scholarly specialty but
for his administrative and public-relations savvy. Mr. Lowry is a
consummate performer: one of the new breed of museum directors whose
chief qualification is not connoisseurship but entrepreneurial
ambition. And we should say straight off that Yoshio Taniguchi, the
distinguished Japanese architect chosen by MOMA to undertake its
mammoth new expansion, has come up with a design that seems a model
of understated modernist elegance.

Nevertheless, anyone who cares about the Museum of Modern Art will
have to regard this latest undertaking with profound skepticism. The
new expansion will at least double the museum’s exhibition space.
But what, pray tell, will the museum put into those new galleries?
Mr. Lowry solemnly informed his audience that only about ten percent
of the museum’s collection could currently be shown. Of course, most
museums can only show a small fraction of their holdings. But what was
most ominous in Mr. Lowry’s remarks was his talk of “privileging
the contemporary.” More and more, the Museum of Modern Art has
skirted its mandate to preserve the tradition of high
modernism in order to enter the glitzy, superficial world of
contemporary art. The sad truth is that the contemporary art world,
so largely
given over as it is to various rebarbative political trends, is
all but barren of aesthetic interest. Today, for a museum to
“privilege the contemporary” is to abandon artistic standards and
embrace the repulsive detritus that has illegitimately come to
be celebrated as art. That is why anyone who really cares about art should
support a moratorium on new museum building. Until there is
something new worth putting in galleries of contemporary art, museums
should concentrate on their original function: to preserve and
exhibit the best art of the past.