Jerry Saltz Wants Artists to Protest MoMA’s Expansion Project

Diller Scofidio + Renfro rendering for the Museum of Modern Art.

New York magazine critic Jerry Saltz has published a scathing attack on the Museum of Modern Art‘s unpopular redesign and expansion plans, unveiled in January (see report from Art in America).

The proposal has already come under fire for its decision to destroy the former American Folk Art Museum building, designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, but Saltz thinks the plan has even bigger problems. Namely, the plan relegates “the greatest collection of modernism on Earth . . . to rotating storage,” and “irretrievably dooms MoMA to being a business-driven carnival.”

He calls the Diller Scofidio + Renfro redesign “MoMA’s Robert Moses moment,” and argues that only a concerted effort from the artists represented in the museum’s collection can stop the plan from moving forward (artists were influential in the successful efforts to block the construction of Moses’s Lower Manhattan Expressway).

The clock is ticking, as the wrecking ball is scheduled to begin its work in May.


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