MoMA Marching Orders

Tyler Green asks art bloggers to consider and respond to Jerry Saltz's MoMA divinations. After some words on pure historical linearity and its worth to an institution like MoMA (we'll get back to that), Saltz teasingly writes in headline font, "Nine Ideas for a Better MoMA"—then fails to give me concrete, bulleted proposals. To facilitate the conversation, I'll oblige. The following are Saltz's points, distilled (desalinated?):

1. The percentage of women artists included in the fourth-floor and fifth-floor painting and sculpture collections must be increased (from 5 percent).
   
2. MoMA should immediately re-establish a project space.
   
3. A large-scale annual exhibition of 8–10 important young artists (with a catalog) should be instituted.
   
4. The space for video should be tripled.
   
5. The space for the drawing collection should be tripled, even if this means less office or education space.
   
6. MoMA should present lectures and panels every month, and these should be free to artists and students and made available online after the fact.
   
7. The museum should institute a paperback series of scholarly monographs on individual artists and establish a regular publication along the lines of Tate magazine.
   
8. The museum should look into having one more free day or evening a week.
   
9. The museum should decrease the number of established anglo and German artist retrospectives and implement a more diverse schedule.

To begin, I agree strongly with Tyler that in not aggressively disclosing the injury to Anne Truitt sculpture, MoMA seems to say that they intend to resist transparency when it is most called for. So, my own first order of business: Ask MoMA to implement a simple policy to inform interested parties whenever works are cycled out of exhibitions for unnatural reasons. Tossing out a Web page detailing accidents would eliminate the problem—accidents are acceptable. What's unacceptable is feeding a line to observant fans, critics, and potentially artists and artists' families when a work disappears in order to stave off criticism.

That said, I like all Saltz's points—except the project space suggestion. Ditto on the annual exhibition (however fun that sounds). Frankly, MoMA ought to get out of the young contemporary gallery business altogether and act like the disinterested statesman that it is. I understand that that's a severe turn on Barr's vision, but the turn of the century irrevocably transformed the context and purpose of the museum. As it stands MoMA has precious little space to act qua historical archive; other spaces serve as galleries without MoMA aping that function. I'm even hesitant to endorse the new acquisitions space. It seems to me the way that MoMA can remain topical in the discussion is by aggressively incorporating new acquisitions in curatorial considerations. Dan Steinhilber, for example, is a natural fit for several historical discussions, so when MoMA buys his work, it ought to be shown in the context of these larger conversations. And that's what MoMA can do that galleries can't.

Suggestions number 1 and 9 will be greeted as they always are—with praise from the Guerrilla Girls and contempt from the New Critters. This ties into a larger discussion, like you see in the academy in the wake of postmodernism, whether the role of a museum (as an educational institution) is to promote a common civic understanding of art—i.e., Cézanne to Picasso to Matisse—or encourage contemporary evaluations of our history—i.e., here are the women artists you never saw. It's not a knot that MoMA will untie, but it's a discussion worth having now that we know what the modernity museum of note will be for some time.

The panels and paperbacks sound especially good to me. If MoMA doesn't make the panel available online, some blogger will, so we can't lose.

MoMA reform aside, Saltz makes the case for an entirely historically linear hanging of MoMA's collection—it would be a revealing show, but I doubt it would be as beneficial as Saltz believes. Worth the read. I'll have to chew on it. . . .

Posted by Kriston at January 25, 2005 1:58 PM