The Museum of Modern Art has finally reached the present. It's the segment we've all been waiting for. The one we lived through. Everything makes sense. No end is left open.
Art is ordered and sorted, paired and packaged, estheticized and anesthetized.
All match and no mix, uncertainty is out, expedience is in. Of the 11 segments that make up this final chapter of MoMA's retelling of the story of modern art, six are tedious, formally obvious and didactic to the core. Disinfecting everything in their path, salaried professionals pare work down to single essences. They eliminate the intuitive and shun multiplicity, ruthlessly reducing art to the lowest common denominators of theme, subject matter and material. Susan Rothenberg's desperado late-'70s attempt at subject matter is here because the horse and the ground in her painting are white.