A Completely Impartial Review of the Grand Re-opening of the Museum of Modern Art

Today was the grand re-opening of New York's Museum of Modern Art, and I wanted to be there for the festivities. Actually, I didn't really care about the festivities; I just knew that I'd eventually want to check out the museum, and it was free today. Also, today wasn't really the museum's grand re-opening — Erica tells me that there was a special preview re-opening for VIP's, and I'm assuming my invitation just got lost in the mail. Otherwise, when I become world dictator, I'm gonna have a whole new list of candidates for slavery in the plutonium mines.

Anyway, Erica and I thought it would be packed. It was drizzling, and we stood outside in one of those snaky deceptive amusement-park-style lines for about half an hour before they let us in. There was another line for checking our bags, not as long but just as labyrinthine; we skipped it and were pleasantly surprised when the presumably overworked museum guards let us in without so much as a terrorism-free-zone bag search. Score one for the formerly security-anal MoMA!

The main feature of the new museum building is a room with extremely high ceilings, that houses Monet's "Water Lilies," and some weird pyramid structure thing that doesn't really go with my furniture. I have to say that I was a bit disappointed that the Water Lilies Room is no more, but I guess I'll get used to the new layout. I mean, if I can get used to that new detective who replaced Jerry Orbach on "Law and Order," I can get used to this. Now, now, now, in the room next to Broken Obelisk Room here, there is Josiah McElheny's incredibly cool Modernity, Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely, which is totally worth the free price of admission.

See, not only is MM&RI aesthetically awesome, but it's one of those pieces where you can just look at it and know what the artist had in mind. I really appreciate that. Like, next to MM&RI, there's this illuminated photograph where the artist tried to recreate the prologue of Ellison's Invisible Man. It was also aesthetically... well, not quite pleasing, but interesting, with the 1,369 light bulbs compulsively hung from the ceiling, siphoning electricity from Monopolated Light & Power. But it didn't all fall into place til I read the little title/artist/incomprehensible explanation card next to the piece. And then only because I read Invisible Man in tenth grade and it was a powerful enough work that I'm still able to make associations with it to this day.

I drove my art hum professor, Christina Kaier, absolutely mad with that sort of attitude. All I wanted was to glean a little insight into the artist's mind from his work, and maybe also a little insight into the clearly miswired mind of the common art critic, but Prof. Kaier took my innate reluctance to appreciate chiseled rock or paint on canvas to mean that I outright hated every masterpiece of western art. Not true! I hated every pompous snooty ass-kissing critic of western art who told me what was beautiful and what was exquisite as if I didn't have my own two eyes and a brain. Also, artists who produce mindless works that I could've made will be at the front of the line into the plutonium mines when I become world dictator.

Back to the MoMA, our favorite Cézannes and Van Goghs and non-Guernica Picassos are still in the galleries, as are our favorite Kandinskys and de Koonings. And I was quite pleased to see a relative dearth of vacant conceptual art, although I did mistake a pair of wall clocks for nothing more than a pair of clocks. My final opinion is that the MoMA is certainly worth the time but not the price of admission, which the trustees raised: $20 for general admission and $12 for student admission (I saved my Columbia ID for just such an occassion). I will not be subsidizing the Modern, because they just spend their money on crap, literally, as this hard-hitting exposé by Dave Barry informs us. Some artist, some blatantly egotistical artist named Piero Manzoni, sold his crap to ninety museums around the world whose directors have bad enough taste to buy it.

Here's what I think... It's not that I think my own crap is more valuable than Piero's; it's more like I'm pretty damn sure that even if he is an obscure artist, his crap ain't worth a dime more than mine. Boy, it's little things like that that just make me want to open up those plutonium mines.