The Museum of Modern Art tries to open itself up.
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Can a museum devoted to modernism survive the death of the movement?
Can it bring that death about?
As recently as 1994, my wife and I were offered a house there for $5,000.
Witness the Museum of Modern Arts daily crowds, full-price guests forking over $25.
Last years annual attendance was just over 3 million (do the math).
(Who wouldnt?)
All this has prevailed since the museums founding by wealthy New Yorkers.
It opened nine days after the onset of the Great Depression in 1929.
Three-quarters of a century after the real peak of modernism, the movements grip is like a vise.
People still quote Duchamp saying, A painting that doesnt shock isnt worth painting.
Why are people still set on shocking their nanas?
Why do I keep asking myself if modernism is over yet?
I love modernism a movement and a culture that can be defined in different ways and often is.
In many ways, it can still feel truly shocking.
Thousands of modernisms ideas are used by artists today, and I still love many of its artists.
The demands of our times call for something else.
Usually, it happens much faster.
Even the High Renaissance came and went in less than 50 years.
Impressionism lasted 25 years.
By comparison, modernism is, at this point, ancient.
Duchamp wrote that he wanted to use a Rembrandt as an ironing board.
It is because of what will be presented inside and how.
The museum has traditionally hung its collection chronologically to tell a particular story.
(It was while World War II was raging, after all.)
The tail is Cezanne, van Gogh, and Seurat.
Barr surmised that after 1950, art would come only from America and Mexico.
His curatorial successor, Bill Rubin, tripled down on all of it.
Except Mexico, of course.
Now the museum is getting rid of the strict timeline.
Its getting rid of movements.
The museum is even discarding its 89-year aversion to showing different mediums together.
Most exciting of all, MoMAs permanent collection will no longer be a static thing.
Every six months, a third of it will be reinstalled.
This means that every 18 months, MoMA will be entirely new.
If youre irked with the way the collection looks now, come back in six months you never know.
At least the static, eternal, Old Testament teleological one we all grew up with.
Things that were assumed over the last 40, 20, ten, or even five years have exploded.
So what was assumed?
Lets look at five big things.
First, there was Ezra Pounds cri de coeur Make it new.
In modernism, only newness was given value.
One Dadaist said, Art is dead.
Case closed.Of course, all art was once new.
Its the same way each generation thinks it has invented sex; newness is as old as time.
The modernists were just a lot cockier about saying so.
Second, modernism called itself reality.
Kandinsky wrote, Realism = Abstraction.
American critic Clement Greenberg said art was meant to undeceive the eye.
Much modern art turned away from the world and into itself while denying subject matter and narrative altogether.
At least theimportanceof subject matter, since much modernism employed traditional (not new, hello!)
What an artist had to render new was how these things looked.
Viewers were expected to look through subject matter.
You werent seeing a landscape; you saw how this artist reinvented the landscape.
Much of this means the world modernism gives you is the world of the artists studioand optical shoptalk.
Third, modernism was built on the principle that formal experimentation is the only thing that matters.
The doctrine cant be emphasized enough.
Every artist had to create his [sic] own forms and world.
(That meant it couldnt have narrative.)
Think of how you see all of a Pollock at once, even though it has parts and details.
Fourth, there was the principle that modern art would kill history a hysteria of finality.
Duchamp said painting should avoid all contact with traditional art.
In wanting to destroy the whole history of Western art, modernists were like an aesthetic Taliban.
When Americans took up the mantle with Abstract Expressionism, they were no less absolutist.
They had not seen their previous culture destroyed by war, but they were still modernists.
Barnett Newman said American artists had to start from scratch.
Ad Reinhardt said, I am merely making the last painting which anyone can make.
History didnt exist unless you were making it.
(Its always the end-times again in modernism.)
Fifth, there was modernisms grand teleology the whack-rationalist idea that history was to proceed in a predefined order.
Only the things in its timeline were deemed progress.
Progress was to be the goal of all art.
After all, before MoMA got its hand on modernism, it wasnt propaganda.
It was just art.
Which means: It was a lot of different, competing propagandas.
Picasso was against abstraction.
(What a pill!)
Mondrian wrote, Cubism did not accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries.
(Im still not sure what this means.)
Russian Suprematist high priest Kazimir Malevich demanded victory over the sun and the supremacy of pure feeling.
In 1912, Duchamp said, Painting is over.
In 1921, Constructivist Aleksandr Rodchenko said, I have reduced painting to its logical conclusion …
I affirmed its all over.
(Hello, Doctor Death.)
Duchamp did, however, muse, Can one make works of art that are not works of art?
(I love that!)
Then Greenberg called Duchamp sub-art.
(God complexes and control freaks are a modernist feature, not a glitch.)
Minimalist Judd opined that with the readymade, Duchamp had invented fire but didnt do enough with it.
Much later, Duchamp said contemporary artists no longer make pictures; they make checks.
Soon Chris Burden and Richard Prince made art out of checks.
Now artists make art out of Prince.
In New York, 85,000 people attended; in Chicago, attendance was 188,000.
One New York critic wrote, American artists did not so much visit the exhibition as live at it.
Albert Barnes, Henry Frick, and the Met bought works.
Its no exaggeration to say the founding of MoMA stems from those 27 earthshaking days in New York.
At the time, the impact could be measured most by the resistance.
Traditionalists protested that the show was like visiting a lunatic asylum.
Matisse was burned in effigy.
DuchampsNude Descending a Staircase, No.
2was the most scandalous work in the show.
In newspapers, it was derided asRush Hour in the SubwayandExplosion in a Shingle Factory.
But why would anyone have bothered before?
It did, and it didnt.
First, in America modernism would have to be reimagined.
By 1948, Newman was painting stripes and monochromatic fields of bright color on large canvases.
Pollock began to drip in 1947.
She gave Pollock his first solo show in 1943.
A new game was in the offing: America claiming the European avant-garde as its own imperial patrimony.
Soon, Pollock was featured inLifemagazine in the act of painting and smoking.
Abstract Expressionism restarted modernism wonderfully, but the movement quickly died another death.
De Kooning said, I know what youre doing, and granted the request.
All this was a direct attack on the life-or-death gravitas of Abstract Expressionism and indeed all of modernism.
Art would soon be riven with irony, something that had left it for some time.
These ironies multiplied all over the world for the next decades.
In 1956, the first Pop Art show took place in London.
In Europe, Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni were ascendant.
Artists today still work from that premise.
The coup de grace came on January 1, 1958.Target With Four Facesgarnered the cover of the No.
1 art magazine of the time,ArtNews.The work was by 27-year-old unknown Jasper Johns.
All are now modernist icons.
A new world was released.
(Ed Ruscha and Robert Indiana painted paintings of words.)
(The latter is a condition of life.)
These artists didnt turn away from but embraced the mass culture around them.
They brought life back into art.
All of it was intentional.
Rauschenberg said he and Johns used to start each day by having to move out from Abstract Expressionism.
These innovations were important, of course.
Yet in attacking their modernist forebears, the Pop artists were also affirming the reign of their ideology.
In 1961, Robert Smithson wrote, I am a Modern artist dying of Modernism.
And, of course, it shocked your nana.
What will it be like to live without the old modernist canon?
I expect thrilling and scary.
I dont want Picasso and the rest to go away.
But heres how art has already moved on.
Modernism is now just part of art history to artists, and not even the only or best part.
Artists are ranging through history, happy to make things new by returning to older unused, overlooked art.
And its not pastiche or gamesmanship.
Subject matter and narrative rise in art everywhere.
Is her work didactic?
In the works of numerous artists, collectives, and collaborations, were seeing brilliant portrayals of institutional cruelty.
In other words, the real worldand not just as its reflected in the artists studio.
You dont need a wall label to feel the gut punch.
Modernism began in many places at different times.
Today, artists arent robbing or trying to kill the past.
Theyre collaborating with it.
We may look at them and pass on.
Art no longer seems locked in a competitive struggle for artistic supremacy.
Except in the market, where it has always been this way.
But the monolith of modernism is gone.
Artists arent just crawling into the skins of former styles.
Theyre consuming, using, changing, and cannibalizing them.
Gone is any bullying certainty.
They are open books.
These are the connotations and possibilities of art now.
Art has landed on another moon.
Where does this leave MoMA?
Alas, I am not a radical, so I am glad the museum wont be changing that much.
I do not want to destroy MoMA or other museums of modernism (flawed as they are).
I still need to return there regularly to commune with the ancestors.
Others will don the mantle of fixing and replacing the entire system.
We all love art.
But as James Baldwin wrote, Love is a battle … love is growing up.
After a century, we are finally beginning to outgrow modernism.
