For $20, I want all that and more. IF MoMA is isn'y going to pretend to be exhaustive, I'm not going to pretend to be impressed.

Please, Stefan. Why does a modern art museum need to be exhaustive? If you've seen one Rothko, you've seen 'em all.

The category of "modern art" is morally bankrupt. It intermixes actual heavyweights like Giacometti or Brancusi with poseurs and phonies who are noteworthy only because they figured out novel ways to break the rules.

There used to be a pair of trousers woven into a mesh of barbed wire on display at the Hirschorn in DC, and I wanted to set it on fire.

I like how you spelled it "poseurs" instead of "posers". How post-modern of you.

Sterling, I think you're intermixing modern art and contemporary art. Not sure if that's ever been done before. You might have secured your place in the firmament after all, then.

Au contraire, I think who a museum leaves out says as much about the museum as who they include. Terry says that MoMA has four Morandis (and I believe him), and they should be on view. Thiebaud too. Pittman: You bet.

It's an especially valid line of pursuit given MoMA's history of forgetting that there are artists west of it and not just east of it.

I'm perfectly willing to accept that Morandi should be on view, and Thiebaud, and I'm quite sure that when I've been I'll be able to come up with a dozen other names of great artists who aren't on show. But even the biggest art museums leave people out. Does MoMA tend to ignore artists who don't fit into the Alfred Barr teleological view of Modernism? Maybe -- or, to put it more politely, maybe Morandi and Thiebaud are absent not because they're less good than the artists on show but rather because they're less influential. In England, the classic example is Stanley Spencer -- a great artistt who was basically a one-man art-historical dead-end. Whatever. I'm sure that as MoMA becomes more comfortable in its new skin, it'll start becoming bolder in its choices of whom to show. Already it's starting off the old stuff with a Signac, which is quite brave, seeing as how most MoMA visitors will never have heard of the guy. It's not quite spending $45 million on a Duccio, but I do think that you can't judge the institution on the basis of who's left out of the initial hang.

The categories themselves are elitist nonsense indtended to elevate empty, lifeless renderings bereft of meaning into something that is inaccessible to the middle class. Beyond a certain level of abstraction - and certainly when you delve into "non-representational art" - it's all fraud.

Most of the great visual artists of the 20th century worked with cameras. As a medium, paint is obsolete and inefficient. Learning to paint is like learning to set type.

Sterling: to say "you've seen one Rothko you seen them all" is a phrase that can be spoken only by someone who had never seen the Rothko room at the Tate Modern. And it's free, something that MoMA should note.

Felix: good point, but it's only people reaching for column inches in the malestrom of paid, incidental and striving PR for this monstrous circle jerk (look how rich we are! look how much we spent on this room!), to which you -- and now I -- have appended a miniscule amount. But we should leave that to Greg Allen. It's a mantle he wears much more comfortably.

All art is fraudulent, Sterling. With classic representational painting, or even with photography, we suspend our disbelief in much the same way as we do at the movies or in the theater, and we only appreciate the art insofar as we're successful in doing so. With non-representational art, there's actually less fraud: as Frank Stella famously said, what you see is what you see. It's certainly not "inaccessible to the middle class" -- spend a day at Tate Modern, and you'll find thousands of working- and middle-class art lovers really excited about what they're seeing. If this is fraud, it's good fraud -- it's fraud which fulfills all the functions of great art from any era.

I look a Rubens and I know the skill of the painter was vast, learning the art lifelong and the effort invested in that particular painting very, very substantial. I look at a Cezanne and I see the same qualities, though painted hundreds of years later. But when I look at non-representational art or highly abstract art, I suspect I am being had. Picasso himself recognized the absurdity of it, which I suspect is why he occasionally produced realist works even into the 20s - to remind everyone that he wasn't a hack.

I spent two days at the Tate a few years back - I'm not saying that abstract or non-representational art is necessarily unattractive. Much of it's very pleasant to look at. But so is my kitchen wallpaper.

Sorry for the delay in commenting; the simple math always gets me.

1) wtf.

2) what's an establishment for, if not to rail against it? Predictable and easy, but true. MoMA's got it's place and function, which includes conservation, being one source of context, and being a foil and a target--Oh, wait, better make that Target.

4) I thought there was a Katz on the lobby of the sixth floor.

On MoMA's $20, true that is pricey. But look at the 16 and under go free. That actually becomes an inexpensive family outing, and I for one wish more young people would be looking at, talking about, and be amazed by art.

joe