Afew months ago, The Museum of Modern Art of New York had a very large exhibition, entitled ‘modernstarts’. So large, in fact, that it was not shown alongside the permanent collections but instead of them (it occupied all three floors of the Museum). Given that ‘modernstarts’ was just the beginning of the ‘MoMA2000’ project, and that the MoMA itself will move into a new building in four or five years, when the Statement from the Director spoke of ‘a unique opportunity for the Museum to literally reconfigure many of its galleries’, it was clear what was happening: they were trying to imagine a Modernism for the twenty-first century. What would it look like?
‘modernstarts’ came in three parts (‘People’, ‘Places’ and ‘Things’), with smaller sections entitled ‘Actors, Dancers, Bathers’, ‘Guitars’, ‘Unreal City’ or ‘Tables and Objects’. It was a thematic exhibition, organized around subject-matter: train stations, trees, naked bodies, whatever. Not promising, in general. But since we are still looking for a coherent explanation of the Modernist big bang of ninety years ago, and you never know where a solution may come from—why not. After all, if the richest collection of Modernist art in the world reshuffles all its cards, and it turns out that aesthetic experiments somehow ‘clustered’ around two or three major themes, it would be fantastic. Not just an exhibition, but a true intellectual breakthrough: ‘an experiment designed to offer a different understanding of modern art’, as the Director said; while the Press people described it as ‘unprecedented’, ‘unusual’, ‘unparalleled’, ‘provocative’, ‘fresh’, ‘major’ and ‘innovative’, all in the first sixteen lines of their blurb. (Then they realized they’d forgotten ‘radical’, ‘rethinking’, ‘probing’ and ‘unconventional’, and got them all in, in the first sentence of the press release.) This is unfair, you will say, press packs are not for real. Maybe. But when I asked to have a brief chat with someone—anyone—involved in the project, to get a sense of what they had in mind, I was told that I should read the press release first, and only then could a meeting perhaps be arranged. I said I wasn’t interested in the press release. They insisted. So I read it.