by Jon Lackman | 28 March 2008 | Museums
An anonymous correspondent has provided us with an oh-so-slightly satirized version of a week-long diary recently published by MoMA director Glenn Lowry:
Monday
To Williams College, which has a strong art history programme (I went there), to deliver a lecture about MoMA’s approach to collecting modern art. I love seeing the energy of students who don’t yet foresee the nearly guaranteed obscurity and penury of their careers. They took me out for meze: I had a beetroot salad and a plate of mushrooms.
Lots were art makers, not art historians, so they were eager to find out how museums work and how to get their work shown. I arrived back in New York after a three-hour drive, feeling unhealthy. (Young artists who expect MoMA to listen to them can be rather nauseating.)
Tuesday
A meeting with Abdullah Al Najjar, CEO of the Qatar Museums Authority, who asked if we’d give a press preview at MoMA for its new museum of Islamic Art: we will. (Qatar has A LOT of money.) When it opens this Fall, it’ll be one of the first museums of Islamic art in the Gulf region. The building, designed by IM Pei, is likely to be beautiful.
Then we had our own press preview for Colour Chart, a show that looks at how 20th-century artists have used ready-made colour. Nothing like giving the press their own day to see the show to help them forget the fact that the public will never get a quiet, unobstructed look at it. Then I met the new director of the Musée D’Orsay to check we’re ready to rip with loans to each other. We’re ready to rip, baby!
Wednesday
I explored Colour Chart. It begins with Marcel Duchamp’s last painting, with its colour swatches, and continues to artists like Andy Warhol and Dan Flavin. Richard Serra, usually a minimalist sculptor, has a video in this show of forceful beauty – he’s tearing coloured pages from a booklet and you realise it’s a critique of Joseph Albers’s colour theory. Forceful beauty worth paying $20 for.
I had lunch with our curators: a boisterous group. (Boisterous is a word you use for people whose meaningless shows of protest you will kindly indulge.) Then I went to an opening for an electronic fountain at Rockefeller Center by British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster. At night it will look stunning. But it was cold so I dived home for a hot chocolate.
Thursday
My usual 7am gym workout, to U2 and the Rolling Stones. Then to a meeting about pop art. We have one of the world’s greatest collections (perhaps you were unaware), but need to reassess it, as only a small percentage of our works are on display, even though we spent $858 million on our expansion. A great pleasure of my job is to look at the thousands of works we have in storage. They’re not really going to waste, see.
I had beetroot risotto with my wife, Susan (did I mention I like beetroot?), and read a biography of Palestinian philosophy professor and political leader Sari Nusseibeh.
Friday
Woke up feeling human for the first time this week (not that MoMA makes you feel inhuman), then went to a screening of Isaac Julien’s film about Derek Jarman – I’m a huge admirer of both men.
Later I visited some galleries. It’s important I see if there’s anything I might pursue for the collection. A dramatic change in the art world is the huge explosion in the number of galleries, so I have to look everywhere. Art is BIG business, baby! In the evening I took my mother out to celebrate her 84th birthday. I love my mother.
