Brazilian actor Matteo Bonfitto and Marina Abramović in the performance The artist is present, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
By Carlos A. Inada
From São Paulo
The New York Times has recently published a piece discussing how the physical space of the Museum of Modern Art in New York is currently used and the vision of art reflected by this use. It’s a provocative article, mainly because of its author’s own vision of art and of its history, and possibly because her text expresses how museums and curators actually think and work.
A quote from the text:
These days the atrium has become a symbol of something that might be called the New Modern. It is the most prominent sign of the museum’s giddy, even desperate, embrace of the new and the next, of large-scale installation and video art, as well as performance art, and generally of art as entertainment and spectacle. As such, the atrium is both a measure of the Modern’s new vitality and a symptom of something more than a little scary about where contemporary art is headed, or where the Modern is taking it. (Hint: Conceptual Art is the new Cubism.)
[…] In this month’s Artforum the French gallerist-writer François Piron refers to the we-can-show-anything openness of today’s museums as “museal porosity,” citing the Modern’s recent sideshowlike Marina Abramovic retrospective, sprinkled with nude performers.
Clearly the Modern’s “museal porosity” is most extreme in the atrium. Here we witness the new awareness of an ever growing, ever more attention-deficient audience and of the ways Conceptual Art and performance art speed up art consumption with the favoring of message over medium, of the relative simplicity of narrative over the complexities of form.
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