EASY TO LOOK AT.(Museum of Modern Art )

When the Museum of Modern Art opened in six rooms on Fifty-seventh Street, in 1929, it was a cause. Reopened now in a lustrous building by the architect Yoshio Taniguchi, MOMA is an effect: historical, conservative, magisterial. It works. The devout, incredibly expensive perfectionism of the building's lapidary joinery and excruciating lighting may cloy--the God in these details is a neat-freak--but it optimizes looking. That's all that really matters for the expanded display of a collection whose quantity magnifies its quality. (How deep into storage of pre-nineteen-sixties work might MOMA curators dig before hitting a seam of mediocre objects? We'll never know.) So intense is a viewer's communion with the art there that any couple of rooms can exhaust a day's supply of attentiveness. (The extortionate twenty-dollar admission price will force everyone with more than a feeble interest in art to buy a membership, for seventy-five dollars.) The museum even errs grandly: the mammoth spaces for contemporary work, on the second floor, might seem to position MOMA to arbitrate art's future, but they are apt to afflict it. What mere working artist can fail to disappoint when thrust upon such a stage? Anyway, the present scale of those spaces--which will be reconfigured as need arises, though how will curators cope with the sky-high ceiling?--is already anachronistic, keyed to the four-decade-old, ever-wearier reign of postminimalism: sprawling environmental works, conceptual theatrics, Richard Serra sculpture. Today's most captivating new art runs to sizes small and medium. Like a brilliant ocean liner, adrift at midnight, the new MOMA awes while going nowhere. All aboard.

The first fun thing to do at the museum is to deconstruct its curators' initial installation. This begins--in the crowd-friendly lobby and, beetling above it, the immense atrium--with a number of works that function as icons of the museum's creed, notably Rodin's 1898 "Monument to Balzac" (standing for the romance of the artist as hero), Barnett Newman's 1963-69 "Broken Obelisk" (evangelical abstraction), and an old standby, the museum's pesky little 1945 Bell-47D1 helicopter (platonic functionalism). (The design curator Terence Riley calls it "our 'Winged Victory.' ") Paintings by Joan Miro, Ellsworth Kelly, and Roy Lichtenstein forecast humanist poetry, formal rigor, and pep. Others, by Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, and Brice Marden, declare MOMA's home-town loyalty to themes and variations of New York School painting. The hanging of Monet's great three-panel "Water Lilies" mural in the atrium is a mistake. It is just large enough, at forty-two feet long, to stand out in the palatial architecture, which humiliates it. Seen from afar, the hypersensitive, noble work--whose wraparound deployment in its own alcove was a jewel of the old building--suggests a big, soiled Band-Aid.

The Newman centers and dominates the atrium as if it were designed for that purpose. Having seen the work, or a sibling version of it, over the years at different sacral sites (a reflecting pool at the Menil Collection, in Houston; the plaza of the Seagram Building), I still can't decide what I think of it. Twenty-five feet high, in rust-colored steel, it is an upside-down obelisk resting on the point of a pyramid that has a plinth-like skirt, raised from the floor. The jagged bumps atop it, representing brokenness, feel ad hoc. Apostrophizing the then consummated epoch of Abstract Expressionism, when modern art definitively triumphed in American culture, "Broken Obelisk" stirs warring feelings--ecstatic assent, vertiginous doubt--that have attended the fitful ambitions of artists since the nineteenth century to establish cosmopolitan, secular equivalents of religion. Newman had a preacherly wit, compounded of passionate aestheticism and a touch of the charlatan. Is "Broken Obelisk" a prophetic masterpiece or pompous shuck and jive? Its shape evokes an exclamation point, but it affects me like a straightened-out question mark. I admire the nerve of placing it at the heart of an institution in which so much wealth and faith are solemnly invested, and where audacity is otherwise scarce.

I was amused, at the evening ...