"The greatest act of cultural vandalism since the destruction of the library at Alexandria"
That was my reaction to the rehang of early Modern Art at the MOMA, anyway. Now Jed Perl, a more noted and nuanced critic, is saying much the same at TNR:
The new building, which I admired for its refined details and suavely balanced volumes in the weeks before the grand opening, when it was nearly empty of people, has pretty much proved to be a fiasco. The more people there are in Yoshio Taniguchi's spaces, the less poetic those spaces feel, which is just about the most devastating thing that you can say about a work of public architecture. The fault, though, is not Taniguchi's alone. Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie, and Barnett Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis, those landmarks of twentieth-century art, look lost in the new museum, because they have been torn from the moral landscape that they inhabited, with its visionary fervor and its progressivist ideals. While the curators at the Modern would have us believe that they are currently engaged in the perfectly legitimate task of rethinking that landscape--of giving its modern perspectives a postmodern overhaul--[museum director Glenn] Lowry has in fact turned the whole damn landscape into a mall in which Picasso, Matisse, and Mondrian are merely what happens to be available, as interchangeable as H&M, Target, and the Gap.
