MoMAs Expansion and Director Draw Critics

By RANDY KENNEDYAPRIL 21, 2014

Photo

Glenn D. Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, overlooking the sculpture garden.
CreditRichard Perry/The New York Times
Glenn D. Lowry, who will soon begin his 20th year running the Museum of Modern Art,
has a longstanding practice of taking time each week to visit artists studios. Which is why
he could be found one recent morning along the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, watching the
glass-blowing sculptor Josiah McElheny and assistants fashion a vessel from molten
lumps, a process almost Elizabethan in its rituals.
Its one of the most amazing things Ive ever seen, Mr. Lowry said. Its balletic, the way
they move and work together.
During his ambitious tenure at the museums helm, Mr. Lowry has choreographed a highly
complex ballet of his own, one that has not always gone as smoothly. The most visible, and

often most divisive, part of this dance has involved real estate, the museums frequent
moves to carve space for itself from the dense heart of Midtown.
And its latest expansion, which begins Tuesday with the first stage of the controversial
demolition of its architecturally distinctive neighbor, theformer American Folk Art
Museum, has brought to a boil many long-simmering complaints from art critics, artists,
architects and patrons not only about the museums overall direction but also about its
director.
Photo

Glenn D. Lowry, kneeling, with Luis Prez-Oxamas, curator of the Lygia Clark show that was
being installed at MoMA last week.
CreditRichard Perry/The New York Times
As the number of visitors has more than doubled during Mr. Lowrys tenure to almost
three million annually there have been complaints from veteran patrons that the
museum has grown too fast and lost much of its soul in courting the crowd.
Mr. Lowry is himself sometimes personally blamed for the museums image as a place that
has become cold and corporate, that exercises its power too blithely and that is often out of
touch with the sensibilities of contemporary artists. And within the museum, his forceful
reshaping of a once-balkanized museum known for its powerful chief curators has resulted
in complaints that the director has consolidated too much power around himself,
sometimes making it difficult for curators to organize shows they think are important.
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Over several hours of interviews recently, Mr. Lowry, 59, by turns resolute, reflective and
cautiously defensive, sought to play down the long-term impact of the folk art building
demolition on both the museum and himself. Obviously Im deeply empathetic to the
feelings that that has elicited from a community we really care about, he said. On the
other hand, sometimes you have to make really tough decisions if you think theyre right.
The decision has occasioned some dark nights of the soul, he said, but added: If ones
tenure boils down to a construction program then something fundamental has been
missed. And what I think is essential is the collection, the programs and the people.
Many critics warn that MoMAs second expansion in a decade which will create an art
bay open to West 53rd Street where spontaneous events could be accommodated; free
admission for the entire first floor; and a new combination gallery-and-performance space
will move the museum only further in a crowd-pleasing direction, eroding the
seriousness and critical distance from popular culture that built its reputation.
While the museums most dominant board members remain behind Mr. Lowry, other
patrons strike a note of caution about its direction, worrying about MoMAs becoming a
place geared more for social interaction than thoughtful contemplation. There are a
number of us on the board who dont want to see the museum become a mere
entertainment center, said Agnes Gund, who joined the board in 1976 and served as its
president from 1991 until 2002.
Recent criticism of the museum has been remarkable for the depth of its anger. Jerry Saltz,
in New York magazine, wrote that the expansion plan irretrievably dooms MoMA to being
a business-driven carnival.
But Mr. Lowry said that for the museum to embrace art that is increasingly interactive and
pop-culture infused, it had to risk such opposition. Under his leadership, he said, the
museum has not only dived more energetically into contemporary art but has also
broadened its overall focus to include more Latin American and non-Western art and more
work by women (critics say it still has a long ways to go). It has also been more welcoming
to performance-based art, though some of its forays like the actress Tilda Swinton lying
inside a big glass box have been ridiculed as pandering or ham-handed.
If we were being criticized for being timid, that would upset me, Mr. Lowry said. But if
were being criticized because weve engaged spectacle or we engage popular culture in
interesting ways, then it does not worry him deeply.
When he was chosen to become the museums sixth director in 1995, Mr. Lowry was an
unusual candidate, a Harvard-trained scholar of Islam lacking broad experience in modern
or contemporary art. In five years running the Art Gallery of Ontario, he oversaw a major
expansion but also the layoffs of half the museums staff amid steep government funding
cuts.
During his time in New York, he has overseen the most fundamental transformation of the
Museum of Modern Art in its history. It has almost doubled in size while increasing
exhibition space, to 125,000 square feet from 85,000. Its endowment has almost
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quadrupled, to nearly a billion dollars. Extensive collections in Conceptualism,

Modernist photography and work from the Fluxus movement have been acquired, as
well as major pieces by artists like Cindy Sherman and Richard Serra.
Over his tenure, the full admission price has also more than tripled, to $25 from $8, and
Mr. Lowry has become one of the nations highest-paid museum chiefs. He earned $1.8
million a year in salary and other benefits as of the most recent disclosures and lives rentfree in a museum-owned apartment with his wife, Susan, a landscape architect. (The
couple have three grown children.)
Peers at other museums have described Mr. Lowrys early years in the job as marked by
sharp competitiveness and a thin-skinned sensitivity toward criticism. Recently, they say,
he has grown more collegial and more sure-footed in the museums artistic terrain. But
they add that they sense a continuing frustration in him at not being viewed the way, for
example, Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate art museums, is seen in London, as a
visionary curatorial molder of an institution.
Robert Storr, a former senior paintings and sculpture curator at the museum and a vocal
critic of Mr. Lowrys, contends that he has gutted the museum in terms of its curatorial
traditions and made it a very unpleasant place to work, in part because he simply does
not understand modern and contemporary art and is rivalrous with the people who do.