A word jumped out at me from a Times story, last week, on the reactions of architects to the imminent destruction of the former American Folk Art Museum—an only thirteen-year-old gem by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien—as part of a renovation that will vastly expand public access at the Museum of Modern Art. The word is “precious.” Thom Mayne praised the plan to replace the Williams-Tsien structure with two stacked, glass-faced spaces, saying, “It needs to be more relaxed, open, and less precious.”
Mayne plainly applied a dictionary sense of “precious” as “affectedly or excessively delicate, refined, or nice” and none of the alternatives: “of high price or great value”; “highly esteemed for some spiritual, nonmaterial, or moral quality”; “dear, beloved.”
Precious in a bad way.
Now, preciousness of any sort might be out of order in an arena for tractor pulls. But a museum? The world’s definitive museum of twentieth-century art? The museum whose last renovation lavished space on just about anything—chiefly that colossal, stupid atrium—except its collections, of which only a fraction can be on view at a given time? Might not allowance be made for what’s precious in good ways?
When the Folk Art Museum opened, in 2002, I called it “a pleasure machine” and wrote, “The architectural strategy is jazz-like. Displays occur on offbeats of the space’s perambulatory rhythms, such that each object feels like an unexpected discovery.” The building was inventively perfect for things whose qualities—“great value,” “highly esteemed,” “dear, beloved”—register best at an intimate scale. That wasn’t going to scratch MOMA’s itch for mass appeal. The buzzword at a recent promotional press conference for the expansion plans was “transparency,” evoking a definition of “transparent” as “open, frank, candid” but really meaning just glass. Lots of glass. Not for looking; for looking through.
There’s a timely logic to institutional trashings of the unrelaxed, unopen, and precious, in line with recent installation and performance art. The popularity, relative cheapness, and space- and calendar-filling efficiency of such works have inspired museum administrators to recast art as a service industry, bent on entertaining a customer who is always right. As a bonus, it embodies a neurotic but nimble reaction to the private market’s present dominance in the valuing of art objects. An increasingly prevalent anti-commercialism makes MOMA’s possession of many billions of dollars’ worth of pictures and sculptures feel sort of, you know, élitist, or anyway impolite. The museum finds sweetly virtuous relief in changing the subject to popular fun and far-out frolic—not that there’s anything wrong with those, beyond the inevitable entropic effects of satiety and boredom.
The mood will pass. It will become respectable, anew, to acknowledge that art communicates primarily through made and, yes, precious things, in depth of experience and breadth of time.
Thom Mayne further remarked, “All of our work is somewhat ephemeral.”
Tell that to Picasso.
Photograph: Andrew Burton/Getty
