112 newyork| november11–24, 2019
talked about how her spaces were for “in-
stallations ... performance, lectures, dif-
ferent kinds of events” and “certainly not
paintings on a wall.” I recall thinking, Oh
my God, more of that old 1980s painting-
is-dead nonsense.
J.D.: Architects talking about archi-
tecture can get pretty scary. What about
what they actually did, though?
J.S.: Well, the great news is that, along
with the rest of us, Diller Scofidio + Ren-
fro were finally beaten down by the real-
ity of just how messed up and cramped
the billion-dollar Taniguchi building
was. They fixed some of the problems
and tacked on a few fun extras and added
about five Gagosians’ worth of space.
But it still amazes me that the suits who
make the museum’s real-estate deals sold
MoMA short again.
J.D.: It’s true that MoMA sold part of
the site to Hines, the developers of the
tower, in exchange for four floors of gal-
lery space—low floors that weren’t worth
so much as condos anyway.
J.S.: Don’t MoMA’s deal-makers un-
derstand that their prestige, location,
and airspace are worth much more to
the developers than the developers are to
MoMA? They should’ve gotten, like, four
more complete floors. Maybe more. If the
developers said no, I’d tell themto take
a walk. I wouldn’t have settled without
more space for the museum. Nomatter:
I’m thrilled to say that the Museum of
Modern Art is now almost big enough.
J.D.: One of the main challenges driving
this design was traffic engineering: how to
get large numbers of visitors into, out of,
and through the building. Here, the idea
is that visitors should be able to jump into
a chronological narrative at any point, cut
across time periods, and have similarly
rich experiences no matter whether they
turn left or right at any particular junc-
ture. How does that square for you with
the experience of actually lookingat art?
J.S.: I love that, for the first time ever,
you can get lost at MoMA. As with the
Met, we may begin to tell ourselves our
own stories rather than being subjected
to the old bullying “Cézanne begatPicasso
who begat Duchamp who begat every-
thing post-1979” line. Starry Night is still
in the same gallery. Things proceed pretty
well after that, till you get to about 1962.
Then things turn boring, rote, and focus
dissipates. Maybe it’s just that a lot of the
great artworks made then—all those for-
malist squares, squiggles, monochrome
canvases, and disarrangementson the
ground—don’t speak to people anymore.
They don’t do much to me these days,
honestly. But students, curators, and col-
lectors revere this and postmodernism, soVisitusat artbag.com
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