Telling stories, denying style: Reflections on "MOMA2000".

"L--d!" said my mother, "what is all this story about?"--"A Cock and a Bull," said Yorick.

--The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy.

It has come as no great surprise that the series of exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art called "MOMA2000," which began in the fall of 1999 with a focus on "People" "Places" and "Things" in art drawn from the years 1880-1920, has given us in its culminating survey of the period 1960-2000 a show largely concentrated on politics, propaganda, and pop culture.(1) From the outset, after all, it was one of the primary purposes of "MOMA2000" to offer the museum public a revisionist account of the history of modernism--a new "narrative" as the MOMA authorities happily described this rewriting of history. It is in the nature of this new narrative to accord a radical priority to stories and subjects at the expense of form, style, and a variety of other aesthetic considerations heretofore deemed essential to the comprehension and judgment of modernist art. Accordingly, the three ambitious exhibitions that have comprised "MOMA2000"--"ModernStarts," "Making Choices" and the current "Open Ends"-- have been designed to conform to this new narrative, which effectively deconstructs the aesthetic assumptions upon which the museum itself was founded.

In "MOMA2000" modernism has thus been stripped of its aesthetic ontology in the name of a hierarchy of preferred subjects, with politics and pop culture now--in the "Open Ends" finale to the series--foremost among them. In the absence of aesthetic considerations, critical judgment--which includes, of course, curatorial judgment--has reverted to a system that looks more and more like a parody of the system that governed the pre-modern official Salons, in which landscape painting, for example, was deemed to represent a lower order of pictorial achievement than history painting, and all works of art were classified according to subject matter.

This was the system that was successfully overthrown by Courbet, Manet, and the Impressionists in one of the crucial early chapters of the history of modern art, and its demise remained--for artists as well as critics--one of the foundations of artistic thought in the heyday of the modernist movement. It was upon the aesthetic implications of this modernist rejection of academic hierarchies that the collection and exhibition policies of the Museum of Modern Art were based during the greater part of its history.

This did not mean, either in the art world at large or at MOMA itself, that there was no recognition granted to styles and ideas that dissented from modernist practice. One need only cite the sympathetic attention accorded by MOMA to the realist art of Edward Hopper, the political art of the Mexican muralists, and sundry other varieties of Regionalist, Social Realist, and Magic Realist art in the 1930s and 1940s as evidence to the contrary. What it did mean, however, was that a useful distinction was made--useful precisely because of its aesthetic efficacy--between what Matthew Arnold once famously defined as "the master-current" of an epoch and the many competing currents of artistic endeavor that inevitably accompany mainstream imperatives.

The idea of a discernible master-current in the art of the modern era is now much ridiculed in certain academic and museum circles, and the campaign to discredit it is one in which MOMA in this country and the new Tate Modern in Britain have taken the lead. And there are, to be sure, many reasons to reject the idea. It undoubtedly smacks of elitism, and certainly doesn't conform to the strictures of political correctness. Aesthetic judgments about art are definitely not an equal-opportunity enterprise. And the very thought of a master-current inevitably suggests that many widely admired works of art would have to be considered--well, minor. Above all, the idea of a master-current suggests the existence of masters and mastery in art, which is a way of thinking about art that runs contrary to both the spirit and practice of the contemporary art scene in this first decade of the twenty-first century.