Time's seasoning

Tyler Green writes:

MoMA must also try to figure out why it is so clueless when it comes to the art of the present. Lots of museums do a good job with the art of the last 20 years so there's no reason MoMA can't.

Hmmm...Art of the present...

(Of course I assume that when Tyler is talking about "art of the present" he means brand new faces, not the later works of a master..say a Picasso etc etc. which I guess could also be "art of the present" if recently made even if the artists has been around for 50 or 60 years.)

Should museums be involved in anointing "art" before the collective judgment of many individual art buyers has had a chance to play itself out? I would have thought that it was a blessing that museums are not "first-reactors," out at every gallery opening, to try to find the "next big thing." (Or are they?) Their role, I think, should be to sit back and see what emerges from the hurly-burly of individual -- not collectivized & institutionalized -- taste over at least one generation. I can't quite pin a down but there seems to be something unseemly -- robbing the cradle? -- about a museum putting art from the beginning of a career into a sanctified place.

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It's so odd that some of the most marvelous things in the world -- say, paintings and skiing -- seem to be associated with some of the most pretentious, strained and uncomfortable social environments. Standing in a ski-lift line (not always but sometimes) reminds me of drifting around at an art opening -- a brittle, too-aware, "Bon soir!...Rem!" pretension. Oh well, one suffers for sport as for art.

Comments

[Dave F]

I suspect present art is code for piles of stuff, talking heads on video, etc.

MoMA, may I sleep in Tracy's bed?

[Tracy]

I thought the role of museums was to provide information and entertainment (the two are hardly contradictory), not purely to sanctify stuff. Of course, I do like being able to see the famous works, I just spent an absolutely fantastic four days in French museums for the first time in my life, and the difference between the collective experience of a room in the Louvre or the Musee d'Orsay, compared to a dealer's art gallery is probably a lot due to the filtering that's had time to go on over the decades and centuries. But, I also like science museums, and history museums, places where the intent is on informing and not putting things in just because they're brilliant individual pieces.

So, it makes sense to me for an art museum to include a collection of present art, even if they have to throw 9/10ths of it out over the next few decades. At least I'll enjoy and be informed by seeing it together now.