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This month in Artforum:
This past October, New York’s Museum of Modern Art debuted its USD 450 million renovation, featuring an additional 40,000 square feet of gallery space and a complete rehang of its permanent collection. It was the second time in two decades that the institution had undertaken a major expansion of its Manhattan space. But if the museum’s physical quarters had often seemed cramped, its cultural footprint is vast. The stories MoMA tells become history. Artforum invited critics Helen Molesworth, Johanna Fateman, Amy Taubin, Tim Griffin, and Catherine Damman and artists Kerry James Marshall, Ilya Lipkin, and Michele Abeles to take the measure of a new MoMA.
“As the market scaled upward to accommodate trustees’ pocketbooks, it’s possible that many of us who had been laboring on issues of diversification pulled our punches too many times for too long.”
—Helen Molesworth
“If the modern museum’s conceit, once upon a time, was to shepherd audiences through a kind of processional, positing the viewer’s present at a historical end point, here the ‘end’ is, in a sense, wherever viewers choose to stand.”
—Tim Griffin
Smart Objects: Hal Foster on the art of Rachel Harrison
“Harrison’s work is concerned less with exposing cultural myths than with retelling them, often in a perverse way—perverse in the sense of père-verse, a turning away from the patriarchal.”
—Hal Foster
Much Too Much: Michael Ned Holte on the art of Lari Pittman
“Pittman’s paintings are intensely organized; they are beings, or at least ask us to address them as such, even if they are complicated ones, like Frankensteinian monsters.”
—Michael Ned Holte
And: Kate Sutton on Hana Miletić, A. S. Hamrah on Ed Emshwiller, Eva Díaz on “Soft Power,” and Michelle Grabner on Lenore Tawney.
Also: Spring 2020 Previews: We look ahead to 40 spring shows worldwide—Steve McQueen at Tate Modern, London; Judd at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Gerhard Richter: Painting After All at the Met Breuer, New York; Lygia Clark: Painting as an Experimental Field, 1948–1958 at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; Hilma af Klint: Artist, Researcher, Medium at Moderna Museet, Malmö; CAFAM Techne Triennial at the Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Beijing; and more.
Plus: Philip Tinari and Fei Dawei on Huang Yong Ping, Wayne Koestenbaum on Jessye Norman, Rebecca Bell on Invisible Men, Alexandro Segade on Nicolas Moufarrege: Recognize My Sign, Paige K. Bradley on 100 gecs, and Joey La Neve DeFrancesco shares his Top Ten.