The shock of the re-newed modern: MoMA 2004

Abstract

This essay presents a case study of the recently renovated and reopened MoMA. In addition to representing itself as a rhetorically new, post-modern and non-linear institution, the new museum is a generic model that is increasingly being implemented globally, and discussion of the renewal of MoMA offers the opportunity to encourage critical analysis of the models of discourse and architecture that are employed in the production of this effect of newness. As such, this essay explores the paradoxical image of a highly theoretical newness that has been embraced by MoMA – as a comforting modernist stalwart on the one hand, but also as a contemporary, postmodern museum space that is required to confirm with certain characteristics now generally accepted to signify the ‘new museum’.