The New MoMA

A visit to the rebuilt Museum of Modern Art in New York City was my Christmas Eve treat.
The most famed and venerable museum of the 20th Century has now been reopened in a new home - an expanded its spatial framework that will allow it to be prepared for another century of leadership in the art world.
There has been a huge amount of anticipation in advance of this opening. Not just because a major new building was about to become a part of NY urban environment, but because MoMA was missing during the 4 years that it was closed to the public in Manhattan, missing from the life of the city. I know I missed it.
Missing an institution may seem bizarre to some people - but when the institution is the MoMA, with its incredibly familiar and intimate collection - the sense that MoMA was missing was palpable to us living here in NYC.
On top of all that, Yoshio Taniguch's first building in the US is an event on its own - remembering the intense competition to choose the architect, a spanking new cultural building in the heart of NYC. Exciting.
So the verdict is - amazing architectural experience - both sublime, exciting, poetic, bombastic, monumental, subtle- a great achievement to create a space that is both exiciting and somehow timeless. It is a huge envelope that allows for the new MoMA to emerge. And emerge it does.

Of course it's hard to say how things will evolve when the dust settles (and they remember to clean off some of the hand prints left on the walls by workers from the last minute work done to complete it on time for the opening), but right now, my general response was not great. Again, it's not like the building isn't impressive - it is - but first, the sense of initimacy is gone and instead we have a power play. A clear exhibition literally of the massive collections endless bounty, with more attention to quality of quantity then to the ability of an individual to feel comfortable in the building. This used to be a place you could enjoy in an afternoon, now there was just a sense of being overwhelmed.

So the good news is that the contemporary exhibition on the second or third floors is very impressive, very current and quite airy. The largesse of the space is quite appealing and it really has the feel of a grand indoor public square where great art resides and people mingle, juxtaposed. The other great space and hanging is the post-war (mostly) American Art on the 5th floor. The ceiling height, the density, the choice of work. Excellent. But that is as far as it goes.
The 'historic' collection of early 20th Century art was relegated to a floor (number 4, I think) whose relatively low ceiling height and density of hanging left us feeling claustrophobic and suffocated, rushing for higher ground. The drawing and etching section, dense, the design section like a design superstore. Just felt like everything was so commercialized that the sense was that we were experiencing an Artistic Disneyland overwhelmed us (I am sure the pre-Christmas crowds didn't help).
Even the store felt devoid of depth - and I guess that's the bottom line. The mass commodotization of art in the late 20th Century finally get's it's ultimate expression - a Big Box Musuem for the Home Depot Generation.
It's a disappointment.