A loss of chronology takes away the sense of things, as both history and art history. It all but admits Postmodern the attacks on formalism. One sees the limits of any step outside history. It means to rescue a forgotten voice of protest, but it makes him instead look twice as cute. Perhaps the show's casual air will only add to arguments over what gets left out.
Women appear almost solely as photographers.
However, the loss goes beyond questions of taste or a shameful sexism. Modernism's lightness of being really has grown unbearable. Modernism, hypothetically speaking Without history, I had to remember the Modern's immersion in the present. With the purchase of P.S. 1, it enters anew the age of museum empires and museums as subject for art. The dazzling shift of the permanent collection comes with a closing of several galleries to permit a construction project, yet another big-money museum expansion.