The Met bets on modern and contemporary art, is it too late?

Next 18 March the oppressive building designed almost a century ago by Marcel Breuer on Madison Avenue to host the Whitney Museum of American Art, abandoned by the institution last year for new premises, will come back to life thanks to the support of the Metropolitan Museum. As officially announced last year, Breuer’s dark bunker will in fact be housing part of the Met’s collection for the next eight years, that is to say the time needed to complete the museum’s original building’s extension projected by British architect David Chipperfield to provide the Met with a main fresh new entrance on Central Park and new spaces devoted to contemporary art (cost $600m).

 

As probably some of you may have realized during the last weekend while reading on FT’s Arts&Life supplement Ariella Budick’s conversation with Met’s modern and contemporary art curator Sheena Wagstaff, the new wing of the Metropolitan is the main part of a plan which intends to open the doors of the 144-year-old museum to contemporary art and improve its already existing collection of modern art. And it this has to be regarded as a valid plan for the future of this institution; or, if you prefer, it is the final evidence that the boundaries which still separate contemporary art from the old masters will rapidly fade away, along with some old biases.

 

As a matter of fact, the many dimensions that the art universe has been developing in its long life will be more and more interlaced with the present time, as it already happens in art fairs such as Frieze and Tefaf, or on the websites of the auction houses. As humans beings, artworks suffer when isolated. They slowly become selfish, weak, and sadly quiet. Look, for instance, at Monet’s giant water lilies in the Musée de l’Orangerie and compare them with those permanently on exhibition at the Beyeler Foundation in Basel. On the contrary, every work of art, from every epoch, gets immediately more lively when intercultural relations with other artworks are encouraged.

 

That is going to happen at the Met, also thanks to Wagstaff’s horizontal approach to curating. As reported by the FT she prefers to have all the museum’s curators around the same table and work “across departments”, instead of preserving cultural differences, or avoiding mutual influences. And this is probably the key if you really want to keep the old masters in good shape and supply contemporary artists with highly trustable standards to weigh their real artistic quality.

 

Nevertheless, it should be taken into account that when you are such a respected institution like the Metropolitan any innovation is risk free. The bad words spoken by some observers in regards with the museum’s new logo designed by the London-based global-branding firm Wolff Olins (which has also designed the lovely current Tate’s one) are just an indicative anticipation of the kind of criticism the more conservatives will certainly advance to the Met’s as soon as the first false step will be made. The contemporary art field has plenty of traps, with competitive art dealers, collectors/investors and auction houses ready to take advantages from any available opportunity –  they are certainly already looking at the new Met as an extraordinary interesting one. But, no challenge no innovation, and the Metropolitan seems perfectly aware that it is taking on the responsibility of placing generally overpriced contemporary artists beside giants with hundreds of years of artistic studies at their back. Not to mention that this risky process is going to take place in the city that already hosts an unreachable art institution such as the MoMA.

 

At this point it’s clear that Met director Thomas Campbell has set the bar very high, and besides, there is no other museum in the world comparable to the Met that is following the same strategy at the moment. The only other encyclopedic museum of this size, the Louvre, deals occasionally with contemporary art, and rarely with convincing outcomes.

 

Only time will tell if the Metropolitan museum will be able to keep untouched its marmoreal, traditional and established reputation and find its place in the crowded contemporary art arena. For the time being we would like to highlight that one of the inaugural exhibitions at the Met Breuer is going to be dedicated to showing “unfinished” works of art, from Raphael to Jasper Johns – titled Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible. In the background we seem to spot the same conceptual approach that made so successful and inspiring recent exhibitions, such as that dedicated by the Bode Museum in Berlin to the artworks burned in the Friedrichshain bunker during the second world war, or the one enquiring serial sculptures in the classic age hosted by the Fondazione Prada in Milan and Venice. The Axel Vervoordt trilogy at Palazzo Fortuny in Venice should be mentioned too.

March 1, 2016