This ‘Modern’ World

MoMA may have a new look, but patrons will have no trouble finding their familiar old favorite works, and that brings up an interesting conundrum for an institution purporting to be about all that is new. “Art museums have come to be petting zoos. They are places where strange, wild, difficult, potentially dangerous objects are brought, stripped of their histories and confined to ‘neutral’ settings for safe observation. This way, objects start to change, to lose their volatility, their bite and sting and, at the Modern, their modern-ness. And what does modern-ness mean, applied to art? A zillion things.”