After a few years’ absence (while living in London), I stopped by New York’s Museum of Modern Art recently, and the thing that struck me most was how tired, how retro, how decidedly dated and un-modern, much of the art seemed.
I don’t just mean the retrospective of works by the American sculptor and installation-maker Bruce Nauman that was the ostensible purpose of my visit (though about that, more shortly). I mean the whole enterprise of modernism to which MoMA was dedicated when Abby Rockefeller (wife of John) and her society friends founded the institution in 1929, while nearby stockjobbers were plunging to their deaths in tandem with the prices of their assets.
