Don't Worry, MoMA's Here

Lauder F-1Eleven, originally uploaded by Art or Idiocy?.

Manhattan is Modern Again. Oh thank God, I was worried when I was New York last and MoMA was in Queens. I realized that without MoMA, New York was almost as dismal as a 2nd tier art city.

Is art that boring that this is the main story of the week? I was reading an article at the Art Newspaper and it said that the history of art has now been re-written because the MoMA has a new addition and the collection has been re-arranged. It outlined the history of MoMA and how it controls art history. No one should control art history, but that's the way it is. MoMA put forth a system of progression and we were all taught it, and accepted it.

But now is the Art After Modernism period. People are suspicious of how the utopian promises of Modernism never came to pass. First The Royal We gave up (Post Minimalism, Conceptual Art), then we insulted it, hated it and tried to destroy it (Postmodernism.) Now we don't know what to do. We are making crappy drawings on found paper with crayola markers about the 70s for international art fairs. Maybe belief, or at least optimism is OK. It sure beats ironic nostalgia or fake enjoyment of lame facets of popular culture. But at any rate, Manhattan is Modern... again.

So the world has been tooling around trying to figure out what to do. Is London a good art center? What about somewhere more Bavarian? Even Artforum couldn't hold down the fort of what Now is all about. So thank god that MoMA has returned and we can all rest. Now we have an even more giant graveyard for art. They put contemporary art right in the front, so we can see all the fresh corpses. Like heads on spikes at the tower of London, canonized by caustic control-freak curators.

I don't necessarily believe that museums are where art comes to die. And I don't necessarily believe Peter Schejldahl's analogy that museums are really just endless lobbies, but these crass propositions seem to have a grain of truth. They are a grain of salt to season some food for thought.

As Modernism as a time period moves further into the past, MoMA is going to have to redefine itself. In many ways, it is the artworld equivalent to the Bar Exam. You're not an official artist until you are in the MoMA. That's what famously set Fernando Botero up for life, for instance.

Perhaps working in art museums has led me in this direction, but I think institutional critique is a vital aspect to contemporary art criticism and theory. History will always continue to be written. No matter how deconstructed, postmodernist, or revisionist we want to make it. It is always there. It is always happening. And things will always be in reaction to it: support, objection or ignorance.

Also, I recommend getting a job at an art museum because then you don't have to pay $20 to pass through the gates of ultimate knowledge when flash your ID.