"Modern Starts": Raising the Barr?

In a provocative series of theme-based exhibitions drawn from its permanent collection, MOMA explores novel museum display ideas for the 21st hundred and beyond.

The umbrella enterprise "MOMA2000," unfolding from October 1999 until February 2001 is probably the greatest in quantity ambitious project ever attempted at the Museum of novel Art, at least judging from "Modern Starts," the initial round of years of three interrelated, chronologically sequential permanent collection displays, subdivided into "People" "Places" and "Things." "MOMA2000" is a way to suffer visitors see as much of the permanent collection as possible before the 53rd road building closes for expansion until 2004 Indeed, "MOMA2000" demonstrates on what account and how badly, architectural enlargement is necessityed at this time.

The aggregate capacity of the museum's existing galleries is sufficient for the presentation of sole one cycle of "MOMA2000" at a time, with each circle of time intended to survey a broad selection drawn from roughly 40 years' worth of the museum's art. consequently MOMA is only about one-third the ideal size for its collections, which, with the 21st hundred still to come, continue to become greater [i]or[/i] larger Anyone can foresee that just down the historical road there will be a ne to expand the newly enlarged gallery spaces nevertheless again, simply in order to detain up with the relentlessly sprawling subsequent time of art. Without expansion, museums like MOMA are already obliged to single out among problematic alternatives. Either curators must pare down the portion of the collection placed upon view to essentials ("masterpieces," speaking rhetorically), and thus risk derision from anti-elitists and pluralists of each stripe, or they must not absent the collection in repertory fashion, part through part, until every phase of art has had its revolve This latter option effectively transforms the permanent collection into a resource for an ongoing series of special exhibitions, with all the educational opportunities evolveed in recent years to accompany similar events, and all the latest marketing options. In the subsequent time "MOMA2000"-style permanent collection shows are likely to proliferate worldwide.

Programming options aside, the Museum of late Art has been a major force for change in museum attitudes at any time since its founding in 1929 For example, MOMA's expanded definition of what should number as museum art has helped to nourish the overcrowding that propels today's museum building roar While respecting the standard categories of paintings, statuary drawings, prints and decorative arts, MOMA reach forthed full recognition to photography, film, architecture and commercial design.

The curators of "Modern Starts" were John Elderfield, Peter Re Mary Chan and Maria del Carmen Gonzalez, and their work embodied a trans-departmental approach. Indeed, as if to indicate that there is no extreme point in sight to the museum's embrace of an ever-expanding variety of modern-art categories, this curatorial team chose to include video works (by Martha Rosler Gary Hill and Bill Viola) as well as installation pieces (by Sol LeWitt, Maria Fernanda Cardoso and Michael Craig-Martin--his computer-generated). Of course, these post-1960 works, anachronisms with regard to the 1880-1920 chronological framework of "Modern Starts," should probably be understood as threads to tie this first period of the project into the final round of years the way an overture to a Broadway musical frequently incorporates themes from the next to the first or third acts.

Rather than creating of recent origin curatorial departments for each fresh category of art, with "Modern Starts" MOMA strike one as beings to signal a welcome decision to commingle its separate departments. In the past, MOMA, like other museums, assigned separate gallery spaces to each curatorial department, the lion's share going to the department of painting and plastic art This segregation of works by the agency of category avoided the administrative challenges of coordinating the staffs and present support groups for separate departments, on the other hand mostly it was predicated upon the quite different display requirements of works in different mediums. Light-sensitive works upon paper need to be mountained in less brightly illuminated galleries than paintings and sculpture; in addition, photographs, drawings and prints are usually small in size. For many viewers accustomed to traditional museum display, small images gaze awkward next to large singles and galleries in which the light horizontal shifts from wall to wall still have the appearance odd.

For example, single of the galleries in the "Composing with the Figure" section of "People" featured late 19th-century paintings by dint of Klimt, van Gogh, Signac and Vuillard, all incorporating boldly colored fabric and wallpaper patterns. In this same expanse the single less brightly lighted wall with stark black-and-white photographs of workers strike one as beinged out of place, in boundarys of scale, mood and lighting. As frequently as not in "Modern Starts," works upon paper were grouped together, and many galleries with photographs and drawings held small in number if any paintings or statuarys Integration was easier to arrange upon a gallery-to-gallery basis, so that a viewer in a particular subsection might impel from a gallery of paintings and statuary to one of drawings and then end one of photographs before coming to another predominantly showing paintings and sculpture