The Moma of Us All

...The New Critics, with their literary roots in the Symbolist movement, with their taste for social and religious hierarchies and their animus against science, took as essentially aristocratic view of culture...

...When the complete chronicle of this multifarious period comes to be written, I suspect it will bear very little resemblance to the easy historical caricature most of us carry around in our heads...

...And the description fits perfectly the antiquated methods of teaching literary history then in use in the universities—methods that precluded not only the study of great modernist writers but virtually any application of modernist discipline to the study of the past...

...It was then that the full artistic measure of Henry James was taken for the first time...

...in their cold rooms there are only the dead...

...The Museum has thus moved ever closer to mortgaging its double role as curator of past artistic achievements and arbiter of new esthetic values to its program for accommodating the gross impedimenta of mass culture and technological innovation...

...Paul Tillich, the theologian, and the guest of honor no less a personage than Mrs...

...For the moment, its gala opening ceremonies may suffice to suggest the social role which the Museum itself has now assumed...

...Where its exhibitions, publications, and general proselytizing made themselves felt was in education and criticism, which succeeded in putting traditional, anti-modernist taste on the defensive...

...Thenceforth the estheticism that derived from modernist accomplishments, and that had formerly been the private possession of the initiated few, passed into general culture, secured a place for itself in pedagogic theory and popular taste, and became what it now eminently is, a vested interest even more powerful than the genteel academicism it has thoroughly displaced...

...In effecting that admission—a task begun in the '30s, but only completed in the aftermath of World War II—the New Criticism and the Museum of Modern Art changed utterly the face of American culture...

...Compared to the aristocratic stance of the New Criticism, such an accommodation—particularly when couched in the tasteful and reasonable terms commonly employed by the Museum—seems delightfully democratic, empirical and, in the best sense of the word, progressive...

...nothing of the outside world can penetrate...

...that reactionary procedures in the arts were likely to succumb to the same historical forces that were undermining the outmoded assumptions of politics and economics...

...But of even greater importance to the change was the fact that the great modernist movements in both literature and the visual arts had largely run their course...

...Yet MOMA (as it is familiarly known in some quarters) has certainly had a greater impact on American culture than any of the Left-wing groups and publications so often mentioned as the salient influences of the time...

...For them, poetry existed at the farthest possible remove from the corrupt language of mass culture, and their own critical methods were designed precisely to preserve poetry from the onslaught of democratic vulgarity and scientific barbarism...

...In the '30s, a tubular steel chair or a glass-enclosed skyscraper might seem, for the average visitor to the Museum's exhibitions, as Utopian and radical an image as any of the modernist paintings and sculptures to be found in its galleries...

...Lyndon B. Johnson, heretofore unknown for her contributions to the artistic life of our time, the Museum demonstrates once again its curious proclivity for placing art at the disposal of both God and mammon...

...I shall discuss the Museum's new facilities and exhibitions in a subsequent article...

...There are, indeed, some remarkable parallels between the influence enjoyed by the Museum of Modern Art since its establishment in the fall of 1929 and that of the New Criticism in the same period...

...By combining in a single institution and under a unified bureaucratic impulse both fine art and applied art—the most exalted artistic achievements of the century side by side with workaday household objects and industrial design—the Museum has, from the beginning, been committed to a fundamental rapprochement between the elite art of the avant-garde studio and the mass-produced artifacts of the factory...

...This distance may be explained, in part anyway, by looking at what the Museum—considered purely as a social institution—has become...

...It was only then, in fact, that it occurred to many partisans of modernism that the Museum had made a pact with mass culture which threatened the very existence of art in its pure and autonomous forms...

...Allen Tate, and their followers has a sense—despite the annoyance he may feel over their incidental pretensions—that they have kept faith with the writers whose works first stimulated their efforts, the visitor caught up in the hurly-burly of the Museum's show-business atmosphere must often feel himself at an irretrievable distance from the ateliers which produced the masterworks of modern art...

...Where the Museum of Modern Art differed radically from the tenets of the New Criticism, however, was in its relation to what may legitamately be regarded as the major problem of modern culture—that is, to mass culture...

...Thereafter, these disaffected spectators continued to attend the Museum's splendid exhibitions of the modern masters, but at the same time directed increasingly bitter smiles at all the commercial flim-flam—automobiles, sporting goods, atrocious Hollywood movies—whose presence under the same roof promised to blur the very distinctions of feeling upon which the great modern painters had founded their art...

...The abiding loyalty of this estheticism was precisely to those aspects of formalist, modernist art which were supposed to have been swamped by the facile progressivism of the Depression...

...And at no time in recent history will its institutional profile have been more vividly dramatized than in the ceremonies which mark the Museum's reopening this week after five months devoted to building new galleries...

...Yet it is the New Criticism which has proved to be the sterner and less corruptible defender of artistic excellence...

...In carrying out its evangelical crusade on behalf of modern architecture and design, moreover, the Museum enjoyed the sanction of important European movements— the Bauhaus in Germany and De Stijl in the Netherlands—which had synthesized advanced ideas in fine art and applied art into comprehensive visions for transforming the whole look and feel of industrial civilization...

...The door is kept well locked...

...Far from preserving art against the encroachments of modern life, it has transformed itself into a cultural bazaar and a community center, fully integrated into our commercial and technological civilization and quite helpless, really, to resist the abiding values of that civilization...

...The general historical ferment of the period no doubt contributed something important to this change—a sense (shall we say...

...The Museum's relation to mass culture has turned out to be quite the opposite...

...Major figures like Picasso and Matisse, Eliot and Pound and Joyce, continued to produce, but their past achievements, together with those of their like-minded contemporaries, already constituted a heritage that had not yet been admitted to the cultural mainstream...

...In the depressed economic conditions of the '30s, the Museum's advocacy of the International Style in architecture and of "good design" in general could have little immediate impact in the practical sphere...

...ON ART By Hilton Kramer The MOMA of Us All Pundits and ideologues who enjoy delivering themselves of knowing generalizations about the '30s rarely, if ever, mention the Museum of Modern Art in New York...

...Whereas the reader of R. P. Blackmur...

...And it was in the '30s, too, that modernist art in all its forms was given the imprimatur of an institution equipped to elucidate its history and disseminate its influence...

...Le Corbusier's bitter description of the old fine-arts academies applies equally well to the old museums: "They are mortuaries...

...Whatever the ultimate political implications of the New Criticism's elitist ideology may be, in the marketplace of critical values it has upheld a standard which the Museum has often compromised...

...For in addition to the intense political commitments and social concerns about which we have heard so much (and been told—in actual detail—so little), there also flourished in the '30s what can only be described as a vigorous and intellectually robust estheticism...

...Traditionally, the art museum had existed at a great intellectual distance not only from the common life of its time, but also from the art of its time...

...With an opening address by Dr...

...To the extent that this transformation reflects a general decline in artistic seriousness, the Museum represents in institutional form a compromise which each of us has made in a myriad of smaller, less detectible, but no less culpable ways...

...It was only when the changed economic situation of the postwar years permitted a full-scale realization of these "Utopian" designs that some aficionados of modern art came to realize that such designs, if exploited by canny speculators and massive advertising campaigns, lent themselves only too easily to a monotony, vulgarity, and Philistinism not evidently superior to what they were displacing...

...It was in the '30s, after all, that the New Criticism produced its most penetrating commentaries on modernist verse...

...The consequences of such a program were not immediately apparent...

...Perhaps our notions about the '30s are still too ideologized, still too thoroughly hostage to the political imperatives of the present moment, to permit a view of that decade which grants full recognition to its true complexity...

...The '30s proved to be the turning point in the relation that obtained between academic and museological institutions on the one hand, and modernist values on the other...