The Bigger Picture Show

By Richard Lacayo

SEVEN WEEKS BEFORE ITS reopening, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) is not quite ready for its close-up. For one thing, the sculpture garden, one of Manhattan's best places to kick back on a nice day, has no sculpture and no garden. And the six-story glass wall of MOMA's new research center is still partly covered with scaffolding. But at the museum's temporary offices around the corner, everyone seems confident that things will be ready for the grand unveiling on Nov. 20 of the new, greatly expanded MOMA, a $425 million reconstruction by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi that will increase the museum's exhibition space by almost half, to 125,000 sq. ft.

Even the man who gets to fill most of that space, John Elderfield, is staying pretty calm. That can't be easy when you remember that the entire art world is watching to see just how Elderfield, who became MOMA's chief curator of painting and sculpture last year, will rearrange the museum's vast collection. It's a treasury of works so famous that his biggest problem isn't getting people to come look at them--MOMA is counting on about 1.8 million visitors a year--but getting people to see them, to penetrate the haze of reproduction that turns icons into cliches. "It's the usual job of a curator to make unfamiliar things familiar," he says. "I want to take familiar things and make them strange again."

More to the point, which artworks he and his three curator colleagues decide to hang on the museum's walls is a heated question. Even among people who complain that the Modern gives short shrift to the new, no other institution has MOMA's power to confer legitimacy on both the living and the dead. What it anoints as central to the story of modern art is hugely influential among scholars, collectors and other museums. And what MOMA minimizes must struggle a bit to be taken seriously. The old Modern was never particularly interested in postwar British art. Will the new place give more space to otherwise well-established British painters like Lucian Freud and R.B. Kitaj? As for the Big '80s, the Modern held many of that decade's art stars at arm's length. Julian Schnabel and Jeff Koons, Keith Haring and David Salle--will they make it through the door this time?

Elderfield promises more emphasis on the new. And he now has a museum with galleries large enough to accommodate supersize work, like Richard Serra's massive steel sculptures, MOMA's new piece by Gordon Matta-Clark that consists of a large section cut from an entire house and the room-size installations that became more common in the '70s and after. The danger of so vast an expansion, of course, was that MOMA would itself become economy size, an alienating blimp hangar. "The most cherished dimension of the old museum was its sense of intimacy," says Glenn Lowry, MOMA's director. "When we began laying out the new building, we had the option of 20,000 to 30,000 more square feet than we settled on. We didn't want to become a museum that you couldn't visit comfortably in two or three hours."

Taniguchi was a surprise selection to design the new MOMA. Although the architect has a number of choice projects to his credit in Japan, including eight museums, the man is so little known in the U.S. that one baffled well-wisher congratulated Terence Riley, MOMA's chief curator of architecture and design, thinking the museum had selected an Italian architect, Tony Gucci. In an era of glamorously expressionist architecture, of Frank Gehry's voluptuous Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, MOMA has opted for a work of what you might call old-fashioned Modernism, clean-lined and rectilinear, a subtly updated version of the glass-and-steel box that the museum first championed in the 1930s, years before that style was adopted for corporate headquarters everywhere.

In fact, what Taniguchi has delivered is a building that offers MOMA to the world as the global headquarters of Modern Art Inc. With its long, immaculate planes of charcoal gray granite and milky white glass, his museum emanates taste, restraint, formal intelligence and authority. Those are occasional values of contemporary art as well. Then again, so are effrontery, vulgarity and obfuscation, with occasional detours into buffoonery, kitsch and porn. If it's at the heart of MOMA's mission to continually sort through the muck, it will now do so in a building that says the art world may have its forays into nonsense, but not us; we are serious.

That may not be a message the contemporary art world wants to hear. And there have been grumblings about MOMA's eye-opening new admission fee: $20. A number of American museums have been inching toward that figure, but MOMA will be the first to take the plunge. The museum is free on Friday nights and free to children 16 and under. There are student and senior discounts. All the same, for a lot of people, it won't be a place where you just stroll in at lunchtime anymore. Will the headquarters of modern art also become the castle keep, a fortress surrounded by a moat called $20? "It falls on us," says Lowry, "to make sure that the value greatly exceeds the cost." The Modern has always lived up to that goal in the past. But this time, it has set its bar pretty high.