immediately becomes congested again.
J.S.: What do you make of it spatially
and aesthetically now that it’s full of
people?
J.D.: Some things will become obvious
only gradually, but on my first post-open-
ing visit, I noticed a handful of trouble
spots—none of which were obvious
until the crowds arrived, because they’re
physical but not visual. The first issue is
hunger. I went up to the sixth floor to try
to get some lunch in the groovy new café,
and the line stretched down the stair-
case, so I gave up and left the museum.
If you’re going to open an all-day experi-
ence, you have to feed the people quickly,
well, and cheaply.
J.S.: I gave up on the sixth-floor café
too. But I’m never at MoMA to eat or for
coffee anyway, so I guess these aren’t my
battles. I say fill in the atrium with gallery
space (please, the place is useless); take
back the entire education building (which
is contiguous with the actual museum;
move those wonderful people to off-site
offices); and, yes, create more space for
people to sit, rest, and eat. More benches
and spaces for the disabled, please!
J.D.: The second problem is sound.
Especially in mixed-media galleries: I
paused in front of Jasper Johns’s Flag,
where a handful of people were talk-
ing in low voices, and there’s a pocket of
resonance in that corner that’s practi-
cally cryptlike. Plus I heard two different
soundtracks coming from the gallery to
my left and a third coming from a Merce
Cunningham clip to my right. I believe
excessive exposure to that kind of acoustic
confusion eventually leads to psychosis.
J.S.: Curators these days think of
museums as a physical Instagram, places
where constant stimulation is required
for effect.
J.D.: Third, tremors. One of the most
striking architectural features of the new
wing is the ultrasleek staircase that hangs
from a blade-thin wall. I stopped for a
moment on the landing and the floor sud-
denly started jumping so much I thought
a football team was thundering down
from the third floor. It turned out to be
one skinny dude in sneakers.
But the joyful part of the experience is
that it feels like a big-city museum, with
all the excitement and disorientation that
suggests. You keep making discoveries,
like the ground-floor “Energy” show, with
Massoud Hassani’s windblown mine-
sweeper that looks like a starburst of toi-
let plungers. The frustrating part comes
if you want to slow down, step out of the
flow, and just have a few quiet moments
with an artwork you love. I found that vir-
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