Going to the Museum of Modern Art is something that many of us have been doing for almost as long as we’ve been alive. When we first went there as kids or adolescents, we accepted MOMA as an all-encompassing, almost undifferentiated experience—a saturation in images, images that were presented in a sequence of boxy white galleries. We went there for the total experience of modern art; exploring those galleries was like wandering through the mind of modern art. At MOMA, Picasso and Matisse and the Surrealists were things that we took in along with photography and architectural models, and it was no sin that great art and good taste went hand in hand. That the Modern was in midtown, in the midst of the bustle of the business and shopping districts, was important, too. When we went through the doors of MOMA, it was as if the real world ended and the realer world of art began. And somehow the heightened experience of art came to be associated with the heightened experience that was the city itself. To walk out of the Museum of Modern Art at rush hour, onto the surging sidewalks of midtown, is still an awesome experience.

Things other than art went on at MOMA, too. There was the cafeteria for snacks and the sculpture garden for daydreaming, and when you got to the point when you were into boy-girl things, you could go and pick up or be picked up