When an announcement from the Museum of Modern Art arrived recently saying “Find serenity in moma’s galleries,” the message was gleefully circulated with a host of ironic comments. Even occasional visitors to Fifty-third Street must have found the pairing of “serenity” and “moma” preposterous. Yet it wasn’t that long ago that museums were spoken of as temples for art, sanctified public spaces that now substituted for cathedrals as places for high-minded experience and uplift—not how we think of most present-day institutions, especially moma, with its jam-packed lobby, crowded galleries, and swarming corridors. (Of course, if we think of medieval cathedrals as bustling civic centers, with shops built into the base and all kinds of activity within, the comparison might not seem so far-fetched.) But those of us over a certain age can remember a time when the idea of finding serenity at moma would not have seemed bitterly funny. Then, the museum did not resemble a busy airport at peak hours. The galleries were never crowded, except for the curved bay with Monet’s Water Lilies, where the conveniently placed bench was always full of enraptured visitors, and just about anyone in the museum was focused on the art and not, it goes without saying, on cell-phone photos. In those admittedly distant days, an art-obsessed teenager could spend an hour after school with Henri Matisse’s Red Studio, exhilarated by discovering the complex visual relationships among all the disparate objects itemized in the