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Art Worship

The newly re-opened MoMA is a cathedral to Blue State values. But is it worth the $20 fee?

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By Gersh Kuntzman

Newsweek

Updated: 2:58 p.m. ET Nov. 22, 2004

Nov. 22 - The guy standing in front of New York’s Museum of Modern Art wearing an oversized $20 bill was protesting the newly renovated museum’s astounding $20 admission fee. He complained that the fee was elitist and would prevent millions of Americans from enjoying the cultural riches inside. But like most guys wearing oversized $20 bills, he missed the point. This museum’s cultural riches are for elites only. The rest of the country? Let them get cable.

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"The Museum of Modern Art is back. And just in time," The New York Times gushed last week, arguing that the modern world is so ugly that it can only be healed by the cultural balm of Modern art. But if it is true that great art exists in a social context (is that true, or did I just make that up to sound pretentious?), the opening of MoMA could not come at a worse time.

We just had an election that turned, in part, on cultural values—and we Blue Staters lost! Now we have a new modern art museum with a $20 admission fee to divide us further. The paper called MoMA "indispensable to our shared cultural legacy," but there’s nothing "shared" about the culture on view inside. If the dominant institution in the Red States is the church, then welcome to MoMA, where the Blue States pray! And what a cathedral to Blue State values it is!

Looking around the new MoMA, all I saw was sex, death, longing, misery, anguish—and that’s just the café menu. As a "member" of the "press," I tried to keep an open mind (full disclosure: I did not try to keep an open mind. Look, museums annoy me. Yes, they present the great works of art, but devoid of historical or social context. I can look at a painting as well as the next man, but the next man always seems to understand it better than I do—and I blame museums. On the wall next to a painting, all you get is a card reading, "Pablo Picasso, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” 1907, oil on canvas." Oh, oil on canvas! Now it makes sense!). But open mind or not, everywhere I turned, I was reminded that the Red Stater has no pew in this church.

I went upstairs to hear opening remarks from MoMA’s director, board members, architects and other people who wanted to pat themselves on the wallet for a job well done. The remarks were made in front of a very large mural that featured an Air Force fighter plane, a mushroom cloud and a plate of spaghetti. From my reading of the painting, artist James Rosenquist is either making a statement about the banality of war or the appalling quality of food in military canteens.

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After the self-congratulations, I headed out to the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller sculpture garden. Everyone says it’s been totally reinvented, but as far as I can see, it’s still a garden with objets d’art (that’s French for "I paid $20 for this?!"). I just found myself confused by the modern art here. What are these five green metal rectangles (they look like part of a central air-conditioning system—but they might be a statement about the banality of war)? Or the anthropomorphic rusty metal resting on a log (the human condition?), or the bolted yellow pieces of metal that look like playground equipment (the banality of … banality)?

At the top of the first escalator was Damien Hirst’s "Methamphetamine," which can generously be described as nine rows of 18 dots in various colors. It can also ungenerously be described as something my 3-year-old does whenever I give her stickers. And in the Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron atrium, I saw a painting by Brice Marden. No offense to the artist, but when my kid did do that, I dumped it into the paper recycling can.

Nearby was Barnett Newman’s "Broken Obelisk," a sculpture that, as its name suggests, is a smashed obelisk teetering on a podium. The Times called it "terrifying." Terrifying? No, Fallujah is terrifying. A piece of art can’t come down off the wall and kill you. Haunting? Yeah, I guess. But terrifying? No.

Upstairs is the edgier contemporary art—the altar in this Blue State cathedral. Here you’ll see artist Alighiero Boetti’s "Tapestry of the Thousand Longest Rivers of the World." This piece is actually just a dull catalog of the 1,000 longest rivers of the world. But Boetti’s greatest artistic achievement came in 1968 when he inserted the letter "e" (Italian for "and") in between his first and last names to, according to MoMA, "indicate that he (and by extension, anyone) was not a single, but multiple, self." In the Blue States, he’s a cultural hero. In the Red States his little name game is pretentious e silly.

Near Boetti’s wall hanging I spied Jeff Koons’s "New Shelton Wet/ Dry Doubledecker." As the name suggests, Koons has stacked two new Shelton wet/dry vacuum cleaners in a Plexiglas box. If the Blue Staters feel that this is high art, perhaps they wouldn’t object to paying an admission fee at Sears, too.

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Nearby, I saw On Kawara’s "Monday, Dec. 17, 1979," which is simply the words "Dec. 17, 1979" printed on a black background. This isn’t art, it’s typography! For a second, I imagined that the artist was expressing the drudgery of our daily existence. But when I got home, I did a little checking, and it turns out that Kawara is a bigger hack than Koons! "Monday, Dec. 17, 1979" is just a cheap rip off of his prior work "July 16, 1969," which itself seems awfully similar to "July 20, 1969" (which didn’t break much ground from "July 21, 1969"—itself fairly reminiscent of "June 16, 1966").

Now, don’t get me wrong; the new MoMA has some of the greatest pieces of art ever created. The fifth floor has all the classics, including Wyeth’s painting of that Red State farm woman crawling through the alfalfa, Magritte’s cloudy eye, Miro’s disembodied arms, and, of course, Dali’s bust of a woman with a French bread atop her head. But sometimes it’s hard to know whose contributions to society are being celebrated in this museum. The Picassos are in the Stavros S. Niarchos Foundation Gallery. And there are some "important" "works" by Kandinsky in the Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Gallery (that’s the family name, not the number of galleries they sponsored). A few steps away, the Mondrians are in the Marie-Josee and Henry Kravis Gallery. Nearby, there are Maleviches in the Patricia and Gustavo Cisneros Gallery. Um, is art about Truth and Beauty – or merely giving Rich People a way to Celebrate their Wealth?

But in the Debra and Leon Black Gallery, I was forced to admit that Picasso was onto something—not something worth $20 per visit, but definitely worth a 50-cent "suggested donation" like I pay at the Met. And in the Mercedes and Sid R. Bass Gallery, I saw Van Gogh’s "Starry Night" and learned why people love great art—museums tend to put the comfortable benches in front of the best paintings.

Being able to see art up close can really give you a new appreciation of it. Did you know, for example, that Seurat’s paintings are just a bunch of dots! Dots! Hmm, maybe that’s what Hirst was implying downstairs. Maybe his painting was just a blow-up of a Seurat! Maybe, in doing so, he was "blowing up" the old Moderns! Maybe I just made a pretentious artistic analysis!

Maybe you should pay me $20!

Gersh Kuntzman is also a reporter for The New York Post. Check out his rudimentary website at http://www.gersh.tv

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