I REMEMBER MOMA.

In the late nineteen-forties, when I was just out of college and living in Manhattan for the first time, one of the reasons for being here was the theatre. Many of my friends went to ten or more shows a season, and when we got together we talked about theatre, not movies. But then, gradually, we stopped going. Rising ticket prices may have been a factor, or better movies, or the inevitable drift to the suburbs, but in retrospect it seems to me that we just lost interest. A few years ago, I asked a well-known Broadway director what had caused the legitimate theatre's decline as the primary cultural attraction here, and his answer surprised me. A new audience had moved in, he said, made up for the most part of out-of-town people who were not regular theatregoers. Their relative indifference had changed the mysterious chemistry of what happened onstage.

This admittedly elitist notion occurred to me one day last spring, when I was spending an afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art. The museum was very crowded, as it usually is now; attendance at most New York museums still lags below what it was before September 11, 2001, but MOMA's last year was 2.5 million, just under the record, registered in 2004-05, the museum's first year in its totally renovated and expanded new quarters. Although the expansion greatly increased the museum's exhibition space, the galleries often feel congested. The vast, amiable crowd drifts slowly through them, holding up digital cameras or mobile phones to photograph the pictures (this is allowed; flash photos are not); about one in six people is glued to a handheld audio guide. People converse in Russian or French or Japanese--between thirty-five and forty per cent of the visitors now are foreign, according to the museum's surveys. The crowd appears to be having a fine time and feeling very much at home in this sleek, supremely elegant new MOMA. I did, too, when it first opened, but now I don't. I'm feeling confused and disoriented. Paintings I've loved for fifty years look different to me here--less vivid, bereft of that essential jolt of surprise which you can get again and again, if you're lucky, from the same arrangements of line and color on a flat surface. Could this, I wondered, be the theatre syndrome in another form? Was the museum's new, expanded audience to blame?

A number of people have come down pretty hard on the Museum of Modern Art since it reopened, but none of them, to my knowledge, have blamed the spectators. Some fault Yoshio Taniguchi, the Japanese architect, for providing spaces that, in the fifth- and fourth-floor galleries given over to the museum's permanent collection of painting and sculpture, are said to be exquisitely refined but monotonous, and on the second floor, which is devoted almost entirely to contemporary art, hugely overscaled. Others argue that Taniguchi gave the museum's trustees exactly what they wanted, and that the result is cold, impersonal, and--the ultimate term of opprobrium--corporate. "At MOMA the unruly juice of art history, the chaos, contradiction, radicality, and rebellion, are being bleached out," the art critic Jerry Saltz wrote in the Village Voice last year. "Instead, we're getting the taming of modernism--modernism as elevator music." "MOMA has never looked so uptight as in this stupendous new space," Ada Louise Huxtable, the dean of architectural criticism in this country, wrote in the Wall Street Journal. The most intemperate blast was a cover story last February in The New Republic, by Jed Perl, whose designated villain was neither Taniguchi nor the trustees but Glenn D. Lowry, MOMA's director since 1995. Lowry has received much credit for managing and pushing through the museum's prodigious building project, whose total cost, which included moving the collections to a converted staple factory in Queens for two years, and returning and reinstalling them in the new building, was eight hundred and fifty-eight million dollars. Weathering the catastrophe of September 11th, which briefly stopped construction, Lowry brought the building in on time and on budget. (Not entirely on time: the east building, which will house the education department, library and archives, and offices for the curatorial departments, was delayed so that the exhibition galleries could be ready for the museum's seventy-fifth birthday, in 2004; the new building is now nearing completion, and will open in November.) In Perl's judgment, however, Lowry's main achievement has been "to stifle a debate about the transformation of what was once a chaotically creative institution into a well-oiled business-model museum," a museum whose interests are now fixed on "the needs of the tourists and the trustees." Lowry, Perl concludes, "has left the Museum of Modern Art's artistic mission on life support."

Ever since the museum opened, in 1929, art critics have accused it of betraying its (and their) trust. In the seventies and eighties, they complained that the museum's view of modern art was too narrow, that it left out too much in its telling of a story that began with Post-Impressionism and continued in a more or less unbroken line through Fauvism, Futurism, Cubism, Dada, Sur-realism, and the other main "ism"s up through Pop and Minimal art, in the sixties. The MOMA curators have taken a more complex and nuanced overview in recent years, but the story is no longer being told the same way in the new building, or with the same narrative coherence, and so a lot of visitors (including some critics) feel they've lost their bearings.

MOMA has always evoked intensely personal and somewhat erotic emotions in people, nostalgia being one of them. Many of us grew up there, in the sense of awakening to a world of visual shocks and mental options that we hadn't run into anywhere else. Gertrude Stein was wrong when she said you could be a museum or you could be modern, but you couldn't be both; MOMA was both, and to me this made it much more exciting than the theatre. Nostalgia, as it affects recent criticisms of the museum, can be set aside for the most part--we all long for the MOMA of our youth (MOMA mia!)--but it intensifies more specific criticisms.

One involves the permanent collection, a treasure house of twentieth-century art whose depth and ...