Learning to Live With MoMA | Blog | Frieze Publishing
Rather than wishing beyond hope that MoMA will change, then, now is time to learn how to live with MoMA – the way we live with a broken healthcare system, say, or climate change. We can all imagine better ways to manage healthcare or prevent environmental ruin, but under the current political and economic dispensation those just aren’t going to happen. And the same is true of culture, I’d argue. MoMA is simply a fact of life, an epiphenomenon of a larger economic and social miscarriage reflected too in the glitzy towers that ring the museum. It is fruitless, and possibly bad for your health, to imagine the museum can be fixed without fixing the seemingly unfixable structures that undergird the place. The best you can do is learn to negotiate it. […]
I would only say that for anyone under 30 years old, a certain cultural belatedness, with middling quality at a premium price, is just part of the package of life in New York. New York is not even close to the cutting edge anymore, but we clearly don’t mind. If we wanted to be modern we would have followed Koolhaas to China long ago.