Letter from Moma
Glenn Lowry, director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, writes an eloquent and angry response this month (see Letters, p5) to Mark Irving's essay in the November issue of Prospect about Moma's recent redesign. Since the critical response (in the US and British press alike) to the new-look Moma has to date comprised an almost universal paean of praise, it is interesting to look at how Lowry deals with the one major assessment to have queried the principles behind the world's most important gallery of modern art. Lowry and Irving have differences of interpretation, but beneath this exchange also lie deeper issues of what is actually meant by the "modern" in art. Lowry says that Irving has misunderstood the new layout at Moma and exaggerated the place given to Warhol and the cult of celebrity. Speaking to Prospect, Irving stands his ground, and quotes at length the section from his interview with Lowry in which the Moma boss himself says of the decision to put Signac's Feneon portrait at the start of the modernist story: "It is about showmanship, the masses, about a fundamentally different moment… it's almost the same date as [Cézanne's] Bather, but it's about the curtain coming up on popular culture, breaking through the screen of avant-garde art. It pinpoints the notion of celebrity and offers us references to Warhol later in the hang." The extent to which this overshadows other readings of modern art made available by the museum is a matter that Moma visitors can decide for themselves. But, more provocatively, Irving also suggested in his essay that there is a darker symbolism in the use of black granite to clad the redesigned building. Is there an inadvertent suggestion in this of Moma becoming a "tomb of the modern"? Here, Irving gives ground to Lowry's objection, adding that he sees this as just a "future possibility" and that he explicity applauds the openness of Moma's interior. [Irving's essay can be found at www.prospect-magazine.co.uk] But a big problem remains, namely that any idea of "the modern" which seeks to encase the period from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 21st is bound eventually to crash into ideas of the "contemporary." Is the "modern" an ongoing condition that merely implies anything new? Or does it refer to a set of concerns and styles unique to the 20th century? And has this period in fact come to an end? Elsewhere in this issue, Ben Lewis (p32) argues that, yes, it has. In his essay on the revival of painting, Lewis shows how the loop of conceptual art - in which ideas of the 1960s were recycled in the 1990s - has now played itself out, thus exhausting the last aesthetic movement of the "modern" era.
Hopcraft's generation
The death of Arthur Hopcraft marks the passing of a group of northern working-class writers who had an enormous impact on British culture. Born in 1932, Hopcraft belonged to the same generation as Alan Bennett and Keith Waterhouse from Leeds, and Jack Rosenthal and Trevor Griffiths from Manchester. Hopcraft was a northerner by adoption (he was brought up in the midlands), starting out as a reporter for the Daily Mirror and the Guardian in Manchester, and then as a dramatist for Granada in the early 1970s (The Reporters, The Nearly Man). Today he is best known for classic television adaptations of John le Carré (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) and Dickens (Hard Times, Bleak House). Others will remember his writings about a vanished world of football. Today, only Bennett's reputation has survived intact.
John Sorrell and a new age of public building
John Sorrell, new chair of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe), takes over at a time when Britain faces the biggest period of public building since the 1960s. Over the next 15 years, hundreds of schools in England will be refurbished or rebuilt. A huge plan for the construction of new hospitals is underway. Capital budgets for public buildings rose from £19.2bn in 2000-01 to £32.4bn in 2003-04. Cabe will be a leading voice in how the country is designed. Initial word is good: "At last we've got a chairman who's interested in architecture and design," says former head of the Architecture Foundation, Lucy Musgrave.
Glenn Lowry, director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, writes an eloquent and angry response this month (see Letters, p5) to Mark Irving's essay in the November issue of Prospect about Moma's recent redesign. Since the critical response (in the US and British press alike) to the new-look Moma has to date comprised an almost universal paean of praise, it is interesting to look at how Lowry deals with the one major assessment to have queried the principles behind the world's most important gallery of modern art. Lowry and Irving have differences of interpretation, but beneath this exchange also lie deeper issues of what is actually meant by the "modern" in art. Lowry says that Irving has misunderstood the new layout at Moma and exaggerated the place given to Warhol and the cult of celebrity. Speaking to Prospect, Irving stands his ground, and quotes at length the section from his interview with Lowry in which the Moma boss himself says of the decision to put Signac's Feneon portrait at the start of the modernist story: "It is about showmanship, the masses, about a fundamentally different moment… it's almost the same date as [Cézanne's] Bather, but it's about the curtain coming up on popular culture, breaking through the screen of avant-garde art. It pinpoints the notion of celebrity and offers us references to Warhol later in the hang." The extent to which this overshadows other readings of modern art made available by the museum is a matter that Moma visitors can decide for themselves. But, more provocatively, Irving also suggested in his essay that there is a darker symbolism in the use of black granite to clad the redesigned building. Is there an inadvertent suggestion in this of Moma becoming a "tomb of the modern"? Here, Irving gives ground to Lowry's objection, adding that he sees this as just a "future possibility" and that he explicity applauds the openness of Moma's interior. [Irving's essay can be found at www.prospect-magazine.co.uk] But a big problem remains, namely that any idea of "the modern" which seeks to encase the period from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 21st is bound eventually to crash into ideas of the "contemporary." Is the "modern" an ongoing condition that merely implies anything new? Or does it refer to a set of concerns and styles unique to the 20th century? And has this period in fact come to an end? Elsewhere in this issue, Ben Lewis (p32) argues that, yes, it has. In his essay on the revival of painting, Lewis shows how the loop of conceptual art - in which ideas of the 1960s were recycled in the 1990s - has now played itself out, thus exhausting the last aesthetic movement of the "modern" era.
Hopcraft's generation
The death of Arthur Hopcraft marks the passing of a group of northern working-class writers who had an enormous impact on British culture. Born in 1932, Hopcraft belonged to the same generation as Alan Bennett and Keith Waterhouse from Leeds, and Jack Rosenthal and Trevor Griffiths from Manchester. Hopcraft was a northerner by adoption (he was brought up in the midlands), starting out as a reporter for the Daily Mirror and the Guardian in Manchester, and then as a dramatist for Granada in the early 1970s (The Reporters, The Nearly Man). Today he is best known for classic television adaptations of John le Carré (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) and Dickens (Hard Times, Bleak House). Others will remember his writings about a vanished world of football. Today, only Bennett's reputation has survived intact.
John Sorrell and a new age of public building
John Sorrell, new chair of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe), takes over at a time when Britain faces the biggest period of public building since the 1960s. Over the next 15 years, hundreds of schools in England will be refurbished or rebuilt. A huge plan for the construction of new hospitals is underway. Capital budgets for public buildings rose from £19.2bn in 2000-01 to £32.4bn in 2003-04. Cabe will be a leading voice in how the country is designed. Initial word is good: "At last we've got a chairman who's interested in architecture and design," says former head of the Architecture Foundation, Lucy Musgrave.
