MoMA'S KID-GLOVE TREATMENT

David D'Arcy, who was ousted by NPR for reporting that Holocaust art-looting story after MoMA complained to NPR execs in early 2005, gives a candid assessment of MoMA's treatment of the press in a sworn affidavit in his current lawsuit against MoMA for slander. 

D'Arcy states that MoMA expunged him from its press list after receiving unfavorable coverage back in 1998, and that it refused to cooperate with the Tate Magazine in Britain once it heard that D'Arcy would be writing the story. (A former Tate editor confirms D'Arcy's statement.)

In an accompanying affidavit, Morley Safer testifies that he and a crew were shut out of MoMA in 1998, when they tried to cover the Jackson Pollock retrospective for CBS Sunday Morning. At the time, museum's ambitious, notoriously vindictive director, Glenn Lowry, said he preferred to have another journalist do the story instead of Safer.

In the meantime, MoMA's ties with NPR are stronger than ever. A paid  "underwriting" spot on NPR cites "the new Museum of Modern Art," and Lowry seems to have no scars from fighting either with aggrieved Jewish families or with the press.

If Tomkins's tale were online, we'd link it. And if The New Yorker put Seymour Hersh on the MoMA story, the museum's former board chairman Ronald Lauder really would need cosmetics.