Went to a WIRED Magazine event at the Rose Planetarium, part of the Natural History Museum. I stood by the Willamette Meteorite and Neil deGrasse Tyson, the Frederick P. Rose Director, explained to us that this meteorite is so heavy that the building was built around it.
It's pretty much solid iron (with a little nickel content also.) Neil said we on Earth don't normally encounter solid iron — it's usually something we find extruded into girders or rebar, so other than some Richard Serra pieces the true weight of the metal is unfamiliar to us. This stone, a little larger than a large couch, weighs as much as a large semi. The floor of the building would not support it, so much weight concentrated at one point, so a column below it goes down to the Manhattan bedrock.
Later he takes us to his office where a smaller meteorite is passed around for us to heft — he says dramatically, "that's the oldest object you'll ever touch" — this meteorite is older than any rock on the Earth itself. Wow.
Later I go to the last of the many openings that have been held this week at the new reopened MoMA. The ubiquitous newspaper and magazine articles have prepared me for the increased size and the almost invisible architecture. Floor after floor of white rooms that don't draw attention to themselves or to their fixtures. It's closer to the kind of rooms in the larger Chelsea or L.A. galleries, but like a whole bunch of them stacked up.
The larger rooms, bigger than those in the old MoMA, make the modernist icons — the Picassos, the Pollocks, the Van Goghs, Matisses and Rauschenbergs — all seem the more precious and special than ever. They're surrounded by vast expanses of while space now — they float. Now Picasso's painting of a blue boy is not just one of his paintings but, having some much space framing it, it becomes "THE Blue Boy". The paintings now have capital letters and quotations — "THAT Pollock", "THE Starry Night". They're all icons now. If the old MoMA was originally a modest chapel now it's truly a kind of invisible cathedral — invisible because the building itself almost disappears — the art is in perfect white voids, the modernist ideal.
From James F's piece in The Guardian:
According to John Updike in The New Yorker, the architect of the newly expanded building, Yoshio Taniguchi, said to the museum's trustees: "Raise a lot of money for me, I'll give you good architecture. Raise even more money, I'll make the architecture disappear."
The trick was to convince the trustees that what they actually wanted was the opposite of what they thought they wanted. They thought they wanted to see something for their money. What they actually wanted was to see their money disappear in a puff of smoke.
Someone said the previous night's opening was "for the artists", which seemed odd, as most of them are dead. I don't know why the MoMA persists in trying to be relevant and contemporary, they've got P.S.1 for that. The MoMA is the repository of the modernist vision, that utopian plan for the 20th century, and maybe that's enough. A poetic monument to a failed Utopia. It seems to be what they do instinctively, perfectly, without trying, though they give lip service to being more.
Granted, in certain departments — photography, design, film — the work is slanted more towards the present, but the bulk of the building is, well, a museum, not a kunsthalle.
I don't know anyone here at this opening, which is odd at a N.Y. arty event. They're all wearing black, as they should be. I thought I'd be more festive than the black uniform so I'm wearing a western shirt and a baby blue jacket that Jim White sent me from a Pensacola thrift store.
