The column's precarious balance and blatantly ripped top edge destroy any pretensions to storied monuments or an art beyond the human. However, Newman has retreated inside, because the garden has turned into a construction site. After all the good signs I have mentioned, I have to say that I left thinking only of a powerful, conservative institution. In practice, it comes off surprisingly old hat, as if art, like the curators, already have all the answers. New homes I shall get to all that, but I prefer to start with the good news.
Modernism demands the eternal fighter and the eternal cynic, but also the eternal optimist.
Consider its three-part strategy. Long before Postmodernism complained of an elitist distinction between fine art and pop culture, the Modern was collecting furniture and film along with painting and sculpture. Like Clement Greenberg, artists and critics have often spoken of the material presence of a work. Here, that means not the flatness of a picture plane, but monumental balls of twine and the clothing they perhaps ought to have produced. Jackie Windsor and Joseph Beuys, who provide these two, have not often sat so close.