The Museum of Modern Art's expansion plan has led to a bitter row over the competing values of size and scholarship
Edward Helmore
Saturday 26 April 2014
The building formerly used for the American Folk Art Museum was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in 2011 and is now scheduled for demolition. <
http://tinyurl.com/k7zaqa7>
A long-simmering dispute between the director and trustees of New York's Museum of Modern Art and the city's artists and cultural commentators has broken out into the open, revealing a split that threatens to undermine the cohesion of the world's greatest modernist collection.
The argument focuses on a plan for expansion that includes demolishing the architecturally unusual former home of a folk art museum adjacent to Moma's headquarters on West 53rd Street. The aim is to turn its much-loved sculpture garden into a public space or "art bay" with a focus on "spontaneous events" and crowd-pleasing – or "enlivening and participatory" – performance art.
Few artists have come forward to criticise museum director Glenn Lowry, yet privately they voice support for Agnes Gund, a prominent collector and board member, who last week said she did not want to "see the museum become a mere entertainment centre".
They accuse Lowry of shutting them out and letting the museum become a slave to corporate interests because he has sided with its trustees, a list that includes some of America's wealthiest people. Moma, they say, has sold its soul.
"Artists are horrified that the trustees are prepared to destroy the museum to accommodate Lowry's vision," said one prominent painter familiar with the collective thinking of his peers. "They believe it's a death knell for the place."
The bitterness stems in part from two previous expansion efforts. A decade ago, a $1bn Lowry-led expansion designed by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi served to create a vast atrium ineffective for showing art and dozens of galleries too cramped to do justice to masterpieces of the 20th century from Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon to the American masters of abstract expressionism.
Last month New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz described how he had listened to architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro describe the expansion in terms of accessibility, flow, institutional interfacing with the city, connectivity, navigational legibility, surgical interventions and gestures of variation. "The more I heard and saw, the sicker and sadder I got. Somewhere inside me, I heard myself saying my goodbyes to Moma. I thought: I have seen the best modern museum of my generation destroyed by madness."
Former Moma curator Robert Storr claims Lowry "simply does not understand modern and contemporary art and is rivalrous with the people who do".
Lowry, 59, told the New York Times he is empathetic to the feelings of "a community we really care about". But he dismissed concern about the construction programme and said that what was important was "the collection, the programmes and the people".
But the dispute focuses attention on institutional expansion in an era when art and art institutions are used as tools of civic development and land reclamation. Globally, there are now 55,000 art museums, up from 23,000 two decades ago. In 2012, American museums had 850 million visitors. The world's most popular museum, the Louvre in Paris, had 10 million visitors last year.
With that popularity, their purpose has changed from scholarship and learning toward entertainment, and the fear is that directors may now be more interested in revenue and fundraising parties than art itself. Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota has described museums as "a forum as much as a treasure box".
Kenneth Hudson, author of Museums of Influence, recently told the Economist that the most fundamental change which has affected museums is the now "almost universal conviction that they exist in order to serve the public".
Critics of Moma's expansion say they don't begrudge increasing numbers of visitors, or necessarily the loss of the American Folk Art Museum.
They point to the expansion of the Tate. By leaving the original galleries intact but expanding to the South Bank (and to Liverpool), the institution helped to preserve the qualities of the original while expanding and helping to regenerate neglected areas.
While other New York institutions, including the Whitney and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, have found ways to adapt and expand, Moma has rejected going beyond its original site, including the opportunity to take over vast former CBS TV studios in the rundown Hell's Kitchen district.
Moma's expansion troubles may touch on larger issues facing museums. Their taking on of the "grow or die" philosophy of financial institutions amounts to an inevitable dilution of quality, many believe. "There are no economies of scale in art," says critic Dave Hickey. "Expanding the scale isn't going to increase the percentage of good art."
He believes the latest expansion is part of a plan to monetise performance art and to please patrons. "If they were real patrons, they would use their patronage to admit people for free. This is just a hook for box office."
For the art world, the issue of Moma is acute. With art now treated as a market commodity – or, in the words of one artist, "poker chips for billionaires" – museums entrusted with scholarship are relied on as institutional stalwarts against corporate and market pressure.
But artists fear Moma is in danger of selling out. "It takes decades to build up the reputation of a museum but moments to tear it down," says the prominent painter. "They're going to have spent $2bn but will have achieved nothing except to satisfy their own vanity."
The Observer
© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited
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PLAN TO MOVE PICASSO PAINTING FROM NEW YORK RESTAURANT DIVIDES ART LOVERS
Associated Press in New York
Saturday 26 April 2014
Plans to move a stage curtain painted by Pablo Picasso from a wall at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York have sparked an outcry. <
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New York's storied Four Seasons restaurant has for decades harboured one of the city's more unusual artworks: the largest Pablo Picasso painting in the United States. But a plan to move it has touched off a spat as sharply drawn as the bullfight crowd the canvas depicts.
Pitting a prominent preservation group against an art-loving real estate magnate, the dispute has unleashed an outcry from culture commentators and a lawsuit featuring duelling squads of art experts.
The building's owner says Picasso's Le Tricorne, a 19ft by 20ft painted stage curtain, has to be moved from the restaurant to make way for repairs to the wall behind it. But the Landmarks Conservancy, a nonprofit that owns the curtain, is suing to stop the move. The group says the wall damage isn't dire and taking down the brittle curtain could destroy it and, with it, an integral aspect of the Four Seasons' landmarked interior.
"We're just trying to do our duty and trying to keep a lovely interior landmark intact," says Peg Breen, president of the conservancy.
The landlord, RFR, a company co-founded by the state Council on the Arts chairman, Aby Rosen, says a structural necessity is being spun into an art crusade.
"This case is not about Picasso," RFR's lawyer, Andrew Kratenstein, said in court papers. Rather, he wrote, it is about whether an art owner can insist that a private landlord hang a work indefinitely, the building's needs be damned. "The answer to that question is plainly no."
Picasso painted the curtain in 1919 as a set piece for Le Tricorne, a ballet created by the Paris-based Ballet Russes troupe. The curtain isn't considered a masterwork. Breen said it was appraised in 2008 at $1.6m (£950,000), far short of the record-setting $106.5m sale of a 1932 Picasso painting at a 2010 auction.
Still, "it was always considered one of the major pieces of Picasso's theatrical decor," says the Picasso biographer Sir John Richardson. "And it is sort of a gorgeous image."
The scene depicts spectators in elegant Spanish dress socialising and watching a boy sell pomegranates as horses drag a dead bull from the ring in the background. Le Tricorne has been at the Four Seasons since its 1959 opening in the noted Seagram Building. The restaurant, which is not affiliated with the Four Seasons hotel a few blocks away, is the epitome of New York power-lunching, having served President Bill Clinton, Princess Diana, Madonna and other A-listers.
The curtain hangs in what has become known as Picasso Alley, a corridor that joins the restaurant's majestically modern, Phillip Johnson-designed main dining rooms.
Some argue that the painting, donated to the Landmarks Conservancy in 2005, is a vital piece of the city's cultural landscape and the restaurant's lauded decor. The architecture critic Paul Goldberger decried the curtain's potential move in Vanity Fair, saying the canvas helps make the Four Seasons "a complete work of art".
The noted architect Robert AM Stern and Lewis B Cullman, an honorary trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, both sent Rosen letters asking him to reconsider removing the curtain. The arts critic Terry Teachout blasted the potential loss of "Picasso's most readily accessible painting" in the Wall Street Journal.
The landlords also have their defenders. In Town & Country, the arts editor Kevin Conley cast the debate as a misplaced outpouring over a "second-rate Picasso”.
The debate has opened an uncomfortable divide in the city's preservation circles. The Landmarks Conservancy honoured Rosen in 2002 for restoring another important 1950s office building, Lever House, yet now publicly claims the major art collector dismissed the Picasso curtain as a "schmatte", a Yiddish word for "rag".
"They've elevated this into something that it shouldn't be … everybody says I hate Picasso," Rosen lamented to the New York Times last month. "But I live with five of them in my home."
Rosen, whose spokesman did not return calls from the Associated Press, told the Times he aims to remove and restore the painting, then decide where it will go. The controversy has drawn a stream of art students, history buffs and other sightseers to look at the canvas.
Breen, for one, is not surprised.
"Most people would be very happy to have the largest Picasso in America hanging in their building," she said.
© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited
