Are You Ready for the New Mega-Mega MoMA?

MoMA's New Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building

Did you maybe think that the new mega-MoMA (with its new eight-story, 63,000-square-foot Education and Research Building poised to open next Tuesday) was big enough to accommodate its needs for the rest of this century?

Clearly you lack the vision and expansionist appetites of Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, who told me this morning at the press preview for the new wing that real estate movers-and-shakers are already salivating over the vacant lot that MoMA has created to its west, after acquiring and demolishing three neighboring properties. Several developers are in preliminary discussions with MoMA, he said, about the possibility of constructing a mixed-use building that would combine private commercial functions with more space for MoMA, probably to be used as galleries.

"The real estate market is hot, and we're not in the real estate business," he told me. "We might see if it makes sense to sell it [the property to the west]....We would retain space for the museum's use and sell the balance to a commercial developer." He added, though, that this was "not an urgent issue," and that nothing had been decided.

Is Glenn too smitten with his role as Master Builder? On the one hand, I think MoMA is already dauntingly large. On the other, I can think of goals I had hoped the last expansion would accomplish that still remain unrealized:

---Exhibiting more of the permanent collection of painting and sculpture: The new galleries display approximately the same number of objects as were shown pre-expansion (although they are arrayed more spaciously).

---Allowing more creative (if temporary) reconfigurations of works from the collection: While the idiosyncratic installations of the experimental MoMA 2000 series were probably too quirky and controversial to be institutionalized, some of that provocative rethinking of the permanent collection could become a regular and enlightening exercise, given the space in which to achieve it.

---Providing permanent space for some of MoMA's monumental icons: Rosenquist's "F-111," Kelly's "Colors for a Large Wall" Serra's "Intersection II" and (if they finally get around to restoring it) Matisse's "The Swimming Pool" ought to be always on view, not just sporadically trundled out for special occasions.

(For a more extensive CultureGrrl critique of the new Mega-MoMA, go here , here and here.)

I would have thought that Lowry, a self-confessed Maalox addict during the prolonged and stressful construction period, had seen enough hardhats to last him the rest of his professional life. But he assured me that the next project would be easier on the nervous system, because it would be largely conceived, executed and worried over by whatever outside developer got the job.

While unable to predict how many stories the new construction might rise, he did say that it would be a vertical building, due to the nature of the site, and its only entrance would be from 54th Street. (I can already hear the rumblings of residents in the nearby apartments, who have endured years of jackhammers.)

He also confirmed that I was right in my recent surmise that he had no desire for Philippe de Montebello's directorial job at the Metropolitan Museum. Maybe, if Glenn just can't stop himself from building things, he should assume a new post as coordinator of cultural construction at Ground Zero. Heaven (and Mayor Michael Bloomberg) knows that troubled project could use someone with Lowry's fearsome energy and indomitable can-do spirit.

You thought perhaps that I'd tell you something about the new Education Wing? Patience, MoMA-ologists!