An Anne Truitt sculpture that was on view at MoMA has been damaged by a visitor. A number of art bloggers are responding to the incident, and, apparently, a newspaper will run a piece on it. Maybe MoMA will then (re)act. Or not.
The issue has drawn some obvious connections with my own experiences and incidents at MoMA, that frustrating place. Mine is about the lead on the floor: enraged for having my right to walk on the Carl Andre floor piece denied by the museum guards, I wrote to John Elderfield and the rest of curators, even Glenn Lowry himself seeking curatorial justice, but only Mr. Elderfield and Gary Garrels replied. You know, MoMA curators are too busy being themselves and having their assistants reading the e-mail.
Mr. Chief Curator told me "let me see what I can do" which probably means "I kinda care but I will do nothing".
He says they permit adults to walk on the Carl Andre, but not children, since the lead of which the piece is made of could poison them and kill them. We the adults don't bend over the floor in a museum and start licking Carl Andre's floor pieces, so it's OK. We can. Then I go to the museum again, with the Chief's permission and blessing and ask the guard in there. Can I? (walk, not lick). And he says "it's allowed, but the museum doesn't want anybody to" (walk, not lick).
So, no Carl Andre experience, which is always a tremendously rewarding one for various reasons.
My silly curatorial complaint sounds that, very silly, when compared to a damaged sculpture or a grave problem of overcrowding and danger to art and people. But it's just one more on a list of many failures that flaw the MoMA and turns it into the favourite target of our artistic hate. "MoMA, the museum you love to hate". Don't you love it?
It's that and it's the useless guards, the illiterate voluntaries that discover new words when I ask them for Jasper Johns, and the long lines, and the general chaos.
It's also the stupid, unnecessary huge but certainly gorgeous building with its thousands of stupid bridges (what's up with them and their voyeurism??) that give infinite chances to peek at the masses like if it were Grand Central Station from Cipriani Dolci. It's the mall-like escalators, and the no-benches in the video rooms, and the shameful, high-schoolish presentation of contemporary art, and the torpedo-style display of modern art, just as it was sixty years ago with Alfred Barr, nothing changes in the twenty-first century.
It's all that and because of that MoMA sucks, and sucks so very painfully much.
One day in Christmas I was at the MoMA and, watching the crowds menacing to overflow the place and blow it out, looking at the guards not giving a **** in their indifference, staring at the infuriating sound and thunderlight of the flashes unbounded by hordes of careless tourists, staying on that absurd atrium where Monet gets reduced to a matchbox size and the ceilings are so high and soaring that makes Chartres look like a Manhattan studio apartment. Suffering, last but not least, the emetic, horrifying vision of yet more tourists touching a Giacometti I felt ashamed and left. I had to stop and shut down my visits to MoMA, since there's hardly a worse feeling than that of being a museum member and feeling shame, rage and embarrassment for your museum.
My last year was an anxious wait for the opening of 11 W 53 near my home. Now, it's a place to avoid by all means. A touristic trap, an overcrowded mall decorated with art, a disappointing awful experience, a disgraceful so-called museum.
Am I too brutal? Ask Glenn and he'll tell you "people would come en masse to MoMA even if we only showed Post War and Contemporary Art". Liar, liar. Shame on you.
