Kramer: New MoMA Is Cold, Elephantine

Hilton Kramer registers his disappointment with the new Museum of Modern Art: “The first and gravest of our disappointments is with the ill-conceived architecture. Yoshio Taniguchi’s redesign has at every turn in its cold and elephantine structure the look and feel of a Japanese parody of the kind of American modernism that has itself long outlived its expiration date. Thus the galleries are essentially an architectural assemblage of—what else?—bleak, oversized white boxes in which the scale of the interior space and the unrelieved whiteness of the walls conspire to discomfort the viewer while diminishing the aesthetic integrity of works of art marooned in an environment remarkably hostile to the pleasures of the eye.”