The New-New Museum

A colossal 30hour-opening began last Saturday to welcome art and architecture lovers from all over the world in what could be considered the Newest New York Newness: the opening of a new home for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, located on the Bowery. The extreme challenge of a new art center’s birth in Downtown Manhattan, as a connection between the LES and SOHO, future and past art homes, was conceived in 2002, and after a five-year incubation, finally came to life on December 1.

Looking back at that Saturday morning, where a long and excited snake-like line of people ran alongside the corner of the building waiting to attend the New-New Museum first show in the Bowery, I see myself holding my precious ticket in front of the Building in an extremely excited mood. Great expectations, great predictions, powerful imagination, all at once sadly lost in a few minute-walk through the main door of the Building.

The event in fact, over publicized and over hyped child of the advertising industry, was lost at its first breath. Any surprise or revelation met visitors at their first walk into the Hall. What else could you expect from a white, aseptic, cool and square outside if not a white, aseptic, cool, neutral and square depth? Whether the outside of the building, $50,000 work of the Japan-born young architects Sejima and Nishizawa, could still give some excitement because of the expectation-rising tension, the inside, excepting some interesting details, is strongly disappointing because of its over-plain, over-consistent whiteness and the ugly and hospital-like illumination. But what definitely wins in the disenchantment competition is the Exhibition’s organization. A hodge-podge of “Un-monumental” objects, lost in their over melted placement and hardly linkable to the small white paper-cut labels upon the white walls, are arguably unconnected with any, doubtless invisible, line of meaning.

The building, after revealing a banal and expected soul, might had been conceived as modern in Mies Van Der Rohe’s ages where modernity as opposition to the Morris’ Art and Craft, was represented by square lines, where the minimum use of any tool was the purpose, where white was the most colorful color, where neon was the solution to energy waste. Indeed, what do these same ideas represent today, after unbelievable technological achievements, after over viewed glass buildings and light architecture concepts? What represents modernity if not advancing on what the present and the past already have shown us? It would be too much to expect a triumph of oppositions and contrasts in this building, conceived as house and window of Contemporary Art of the 21st Century? Was it too much to expect from a white, aseptic, cool and square outside a colorful, welcoming, warm and curvilinear interior or better something even not easily imaginable?