Panel Discussion at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, January 25, 2000. On a chilly New York evening last month, Sir Nicholas Serota, Werner Spies and Glenn Lowry presented their plans for the installation of their permanent collections in their new or expanded museums to a packed audience. The modern art museum of the twenty-first century will, it is clear from all three accounts, be organised less according to the linear flow of historical 'isms' within discrete fields than as a matrix of thematically related objects spanning geography, historical periods and disciplines. Beyond the differences necessitated by the depth and breadth of their permanent collections, the directors presented a surprisingly unified account of their goals and strategies. The big winner in this new scheme is contemporary art, that province of amorphous historical bounds and sprawling forms whose relative value in the institution has always been under question.
Contemporary art is embraced in all of the new installations.
Dr. Spies intends an exemplary dialectic between the contemporary and the historical. The new MoMA will offer contemporary work at the beginning of the installation and invite the viewer to wander in a self-directed tour. The inherent risk, of course, is that the curators of the permanent collections may instead seem to be playing with their treasures a game of musical masterpieces, where the resonance between neighbouring objects may appear to the viewer as haphazard, simplistic or simply unintelligible. While Nick Serota succinctly enumerated the weaknesses of the past century's linear history, one may also wonder what effect this new method will have on the twenty-first century viewer. The role of the museum as a textbook of the history of modern art will probably be diminished.