Arts
MoMA’s Expansion and Director Draw Critics
Glenn
D. Lowry, who will soon begin his 20th year running the Museum of
Modern Art, has a longstanding practice of taking time each week to
visit artists’ studios. Which is why he could be found one recent
morning along the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, watching the glass-blowing
sculptor Josiah McElheny and assistants fashion a vessel from molten lumps, a process almost Elizabethan in its rituals.
“It’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen,” Mr. Lowry said. “It’s balletic, the way they move and work together.”
During
his ambitious tenure at the museum’s helm, Mr. Lowry has choreographed a
highly complex ballet of his own, one that has not always gone as
smoothly. The most visible, and often most divisive, part of this dance
has involved real estate, the museum’s frequent moves to carve space for
itself from the dense heart of Midtown.
And
its latest expansion, which begins Tuesday with the first stage of the
controversial demolition of its architecturally distinctive neighbor,
the former American Folk Art Museum,
has brought to a boil many long-simmering complaints from art critics,
artists, architects and patrons not only about the museum’s overall
direction but also about its director.
As
the number of visitors has more than doubled during Mr. Lowry’s tenure —
to almost three million annually — there have been complaints from
veteran patrons that the museum has grown too fast and lost much of its
soul in courting the crowd.
Mr.
Lowry is himself sometimes personally blamed for the museum’s image as a
place that has become cold and corporate, that exercises its power too
blithely and that is often out of touch with the sensibilities of
contemporary artists. And within the museum, his forceful reshaping of a
once-balkanized museum known for its powerful chief curators has
resulted in complaints that the director has consolidated too much power
around himself, sometimes making it difficult for curators to organize
shows they think are important.
Over
several hours of interviews recently, Mr. Lowry, 59, by turns resolute,
reflective and cautiously defensive, sought to play down the long-term
impact of the folk art building demolition on both the museum and
himself. “Obviously I’m deeply empathetic to the feelings that that has
elicited from a community we really care about,” he said. “On the other
hand, sometimes you have to make really tough decisions if you think
they’re right.” The decision has occasioned some “dark nights of the
soul,” he said, but added: “If one’s tenure boils down to a construction
program then something fundamental has been missed. And what I think is
essential is the collection, the programs and the people.”
Many
critics warn that MoMA’s second expansion in a decade — which will
create an “art bay” open to West 53rd Street where “spontaneous events”
could be accommodated; free admission for the entire first floor; and a
new combination gallery-and-performance space — will move the museum
only further in a crowd-pleasing direction, eroding the seriousness and
critical distance from popular culture that built its reputation.
While
the museum’s most dominant board members remain behind Mr. Lowry, other
patrons strike a note of caution about its direction, worrying about
MoMA’s becoming a place geared more for social interaction than
thoughtful contemplation. “There are a number of us on the board who
don’t want to see the museum become a mere entertainment center,” said
Agnes Gund, who joined the board in 1976 and served as its president
from 1991 until 2002.
Recent criticism of the museum has been remarkable for the depth of its anger. Jerry Saltz, in New York magazine, wrote that the expansion plan “irretrievably dooms MoMA to being a business-driven carnival.”
But
Mr. Lowry said that for the museum to embrace art that is increasingly
interactive and pop-culture infused, it had to risk such opposition.
Under his leadership, he said, the museum has not only dived more
energetically into contemporary art but has also broadened its overall
focus to include more Latin American and non-Western art and more work
by women (critics say it still has a long ways to go). It has also been
more welcoming to performance-based art, though some of its forays —
like the actress Tilda Swinton lying inside a big glass box — have been
ridiculed as pandering or ham-handed.
“If
we were being criticized for being timid, that would upset me,” Mr.
Lowry said. “But if we’re being criticized because we’ve engaged
spectacle or we engage popular culture in interesting ways,” then it
does not worry him deeply.
When
he was chosen to become the museum’s sixth director in 1995, Mr. Lowry
was an unusual candidate, a Harvard-trained scholar of Islam lacking
broad experience in modern or contemporary art. In five years running
the Art Gallery of Ontario, he oversaw a major expansion but also the
layoffs of half the museum’s staff amid steep government funding cuts.
During
his time in New York, he has overseen the most fundamental
transformation of the Museum of Modern Art in its history. It has almost
doubled in size while increasing exhibition space, to 125,000 square
feet from 85,000. Its endowment has almost quadrupled, to nearly a
billion dollars. Extensive collections — in Conceptualism, Modernist
photography and work from the Fluxus movement — have been acquired, as
well as major pieces by artists like Cindy Sherman and Richard Serra.
Over
his tenure, the full admission price has also more than tripled, to $25
from $8, and Mr. Lowry has become one of the nation’s highest-paid
museum chiefs. He earned $1.8 million a year in salary and other
benefits as of the most recent disclosures and lives rent-free in a museum-owned apartment with his wife, Susan, a landscape architect. (The couple have three grown children.)
Peers
at other museums have described Mr. Lowry’s early years in the job as
marked by sharp competitiveness and a thin-skinned sensitivity toward
criticism. Recently, they say, he has grown more collegial and more
sure-footed in the museum’s artistic terrain. But they add that they
sense a continuing frustration in him at not being viewed the way, for
example, Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate art museums, is seen
in London, as a visionary curatorial molder of an institution.
Robert Storr, a former senior paintings and sculpture curator at the museum and a vocal critic
of Mr. Lowry’s, contends that he has “gutted the museum in terms of its
curatorial traditions and made it a very unpleasant place to work,” in
part because he “simply does not understand modern and contemporary art
and is rivalrous with the people who do.”
“I
love the museum, and I don’t want to be seen as a MoMA basher. I am
not,” said Mr. Storr, who left the museum in 2002 after 12 years and has
been dean of the Yale University School of Art since 2006. “But I fear some of the damage done is nearly irreversible.”
(Many
people interviewed for this article said they would not criticize Mr.
Lowry on the record, wary of offending a figure with such power in the
art world.)
Mr.
Lowry evinces little of the frustration described by his critics. And
he denies he has sought to consolidate directorial power for his own
sake but only to push curators to operate more collaboratively, to make
the museum more nimble.
“I
hope that I’m the kind of person who leads from behind, not in front,”
he said recently in his office, where a Donald Judd sculpture hangs
behind his desk. He declined to address Mr. Storr’s criticisms
specifically. “The fact that he’s an ardent critic of the institution is
something that we all have to live with,” he said, “but it doesn’t take
away from his talent.”
But Mr. Lowry said he has been deeply concerned with a perception of the museum and of himself as corporate.
“It
leaves me somewhat puzzled,” he said, protesting that he does not come
from a business background. But, he added, “It’s a moniker that has
stuck, so it clearly has some traction.” His own passions, he said,
continue to be what they have been since the day he rejected a pre-med
education and dived into art as a scholar and later a curator at the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries: artists, art history and research.
Mr.
Lowry’s tenure was praised by Marie-Josée Kravis, the museum’s board
president; Sharon Percy Rockefeller, a trustee whose family was
instrumental in the museum’s founding; and Jerry I. Speyer, the board
chairman and real-estate magnate. “I think it would be a mistake for him
to be influenced by a handful of people who have personal grudges,” Mr.
Speyer said.
He
added, “The best way to frame it is that I think Glenn could run any
American company he chose to run, any foundation he chose to run, any
university he chose to run.”
But
lavish as such praise is, it probably does not describe Mr. Lowry fully
as he would like to be described. “Glenn, from the beginning, didn’t
want to be seen as a manager,” Ms. Gund said. “I do think it has had
some effect in the past on who was there and who decided to leave. But
that’s in the past, and it should probably be left in the past.” She
added, “He has tried to immerse himself in knowledge about artists, and I
don’t think that’s a bad thing.”
Mr.
Lowry said the experience of watching the museum turn the corner into a
new millennium “still feels like a dream,” and that he has no intention
of leaving anytime soon.
“I’m
a hyper-anxious person by demeanor, so I’m always restless and anxious,
and I try to compensate for that by breathing in and breathing out as
calmly as I can,” he said, smiling wryly. “But we have a policy of
senior staff at this institution retiring at or around 65, and I don’t
intend to break that policy. I’ll do my best between now and then.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment-- or suggestions, particularly of topics and places you'd like to see covered