Art

...The play is also full of show-business jokes, the most sustained one being the playwright's agent, named after and presumably modeled on the famous Audrey Wood, who was Kopit's own agent...

...Once artists began constructing loft studios in buildings that at the turn of the century housed the city's garment industry, a neighborhood even the middle-class wanted no part of suddenly became chic...

...End of the Worm effectively embodies it...

...With its factory-like facade of marble, translucent glass, and metal, the Goodwin-Stone building was a perfect choice, one that immediately set MOMA apart from the Beaux-Arts Metropolitan Museum of Art...

...In the case of the Museum of Modern Art, there is no question that the building should be a background to the collection," Pelli has declared...

...I~ERALD WEALES Art THE NEW MOMA PRESERVING MODERNISM OVER THE LAST decade New York's real-es, tate dealers have learned to pay attention to New York s art world...

...It was living in a world in which, as New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger has pointed out, "both modern art and modern architecture have become the establishment of our culture" and in the process lost their power to shock...

...tossing out the infant son he adored, and the ugly thrill that stayed with him even as he closed the window and turned away is allied to the attraction of annihilation, the curiosity and fascination edging us toward the end of the world...

...Any of these might be at home in a political revue, anti-nuke cartoons with no force beyond their immediate ef- fect, but Kopit has designed them to fit into the growing knowledg e and despair of his playwright, so that they are dramatically much more than satiric interludes...

...Stone tells Trent that a play is the best vehicle for his warning to the world because it is the form that appeals at once to emotion and intellect...

...In the 1960s as in the 1930s, it was making clear that the modernism it collected would be sur- rounded by the latest in modern architecture...

...The result is a lesson in real-estate management that urban museums with a need for cash and space are sure to notice, but the overriding significance of what MOMA has accomplished in the middle of Manhattan lies in the renovation itself...

...In exchange for its air rights, MOMA has already received a $17 million lump-sum payment and in the future will benefit from tax- equivalency payments that by the year 2000 are expected to total $3 million annually...

...The second act consists of three interviews: a general/physicist, now a pipe-smoking country gentleman, gives a rationally irrational explanation of the necessity of nuclear dependence...

...The battles it had poured so much energy into during its pioneering period were now safely in the victory column...

...In a city with a 1.9 percent housing vacancy rate, the art-and-real-estate connection is likely to persist...

...Soho is the classic case of the art-real estate boom...

...Sharply delineated by Linda Hunt, she is a motherly figure whose pastel suits and tea table manners cover a steely profes- sional...

...But the Museum of Modern Art with the completion of its new home, has shown that the process can at least be stood on its head...

...The Real Thing, in so far as it is about the art of playwrighting, says the same thing...

...a Russian expert with a thick accent (a bit too Strangelovey this) insists, a touch too enthusiastically, on the inevitability of war...

...From this description, one might not know that much of the play is funny --if frighteningly so...

...Like the pioneers of a century ago, the artists have made territory once considered dangerous "safe" for those unwill- ing to risk the new...

...a discreetly gay couple who work for a war-games think tank, playfully expli- cate a nuclear-war scenario while they whip up dinner for Trent...

...The founders of MOMA were determined to get Americans to look at art that challenged the traditional master works which then dominated established collections, and they wanted a building to sym- bolize their intentions...

...Wherever the artists and their gal- leries have gone, real-estate prices have immediately climbed...

...Now the Soho gentrification process is spreading to the Lower East Side...

...With its understated construction and airy spaces, it provided an environment that assumes MOMA's position in the art word rather than chal- lenges the viewer to notice it...

...MOMA was no longer the new kid on block nor the leader of an avant-garde art movement...

...In 1939, when it moved from the Rockefeller-owned town house that held its collection to the international-style building of Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, MOMA was making a clear statement about its purposes...

...With good reason...

...The 13 July 1984:405...

...In its Goodwin-Stone building MOMA had not only the right home for the Ctzannes and Picassos it would feature in its early years, it also had the right home for the abstract expres- sionism it would champion in the years following World War II...

...The new MOMA, designed by Cesar Pelli, Dean of the Yale School of Architecture and former project designer for Eero Saarinen, reflects this change in history...

...Streets that used to belong to junkies and the poor have become, with the arrival of a 1980s' generation of g~,lle~ies, a desirable place to rent and build condos...

...When in 1964 MOMA expanded with an East Wing de- signed by Philip Johnson, it was being consistent with its initial building impulse...

...In the late 1970s, however, when the museum decided to expand again, it faced a very different set of circumstances...

...By allowing a fifty-two-story condominium tower to be built over property to which it controls the air fights, MOMA has been able to finance a $55 million project that doubles its exhibition space and gives it a new six-story West Wing...

...She seems a single-note comic character until the last act when, asked to face what Trent has discovered in Washing- ton, she becomes suddenly human and vulnerable and, unwill- ing to believe what she now knows, escapes into the Connec- ticut countryside...