“L—d!” said my mother, “what is all this story about?”—“A Cock and a Bull,” said Yorick.
—The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy.

It has come as no great surprise that the series of exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art called “MOMA2000,” which began in the fall of 1999 with a focus on “People,” “Places,” and “Things” in art drawn from the years 1880–1920, has given us in its culminating survey of the period 1960–2000 a show largely concentrated on politics, propaganda, and pop culture. [1] From the outset, after all, it was one of the primary purposes of “MOMA2000” to offer the museum public a revisionist account of the history of modernism—a new “narrative,” as the MOMA authorities happily described this rewriting of history. It is in the nature of this new narrative to accord a radical priority to stories and subjects at the expense of form, style, and a variety of other aesthetic considerations heretofore deemed essential to the comprehension and judgment of modernist art. Accordingly, the three ambitious exhibitions that have comprised “MOMA2000”—“ModernStarts,” “Making Choices,” and the current “Open Ends”—have been designed to conform to this new narrative, which effectively deconstructs the aesthetic assumptions upon which the museum itself was founded.

In “MOMA2000,” modernism has thus been stripped of its aesthetic ontology in the name of a hierarchy of preferred subjects, with politics and pop culture now—in the “Open Ends” finale