The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis
SECULARIZING RITUALS
Museums play a unique ideological role, transforming abstract ideology into living belief through objects and surroundings.
Museums are ceremonial monuments, similar to temples, churches, and shrines, dedicated exclusively to ideology.
These monuments affirm the power and social authority of a patron class and impress society's revered values and beliefs.
Museums select and arrange works of art within a sequence of spaces, organizing the visitor's experience like a script organizes a performance.
The museum experience closely resembles religious rituals in form and content.
Paintings and sculptures in museums play the same role as in ritual architecture, articulating and enlarging the meaning of activities on the site.
Traditional monumental architecture uses decorative elements to form a coherent whole or an iconographic program, based on authoritative literary sources.
These programs evoke a mythic or historical past that informs and justifies the values celebrated in the ceremonial space.
Museums function as ceremonial monuments, presenting an ensemble of art objects that serves as an iconographic program.
Museums sanction viewing art one-by-one in an ahistorical environment, defining their primary function as housing objects in a neutral space.
The structured ritual space remains invisible, experienced as a transparent medium for objective art viewing.
Museums conform to established types, such as traditional state or municipal museums and modern art museums.
Each type corresponds to a moment in bourgeois ideology and has its own iconographic tradition, relying on conventional art history for coherence.
The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)
MOMA represents the Chartres of mid-twentieth-century modern art museums, serving as a prototype for modern art museums.
It quickly became a model for cities and capitals, translating late capitalism ideology into vivid artistic terms.
MOMA is a monument to individualism, understood as subjective freedom.
The façade, with its clean steel and glass forms, announced a future of efficiency and rationality, contrasting with the Victorian rhetoric of its neighbors.
It presents an impersonal wall of glass, addressing visitors as private individuals valuing subjective experience.
The blank exterior suggests a separation of public and private, external and internal.
Traditional museums dramatize the passage from the exterior to the interior, asserting the existence of a community; MOMA's entry differs, with only a glass membrane separating the street and interior.
Visitors are visually drawn into the interior and released into the space like a molecule into a gas, experiencing a heightened sense of individual free choice.
The ground floor lacks architectural imperatives, increasing the sense of individual freedom.
Visitors choose where to go, with regular visitors seeking specific exhibitions or films, while newcomers may feel disoriented.
Temporary exhibition spaces are located to the left and right, with major exhibitions in large spaces and recent trends near the cafeteria.
The main ceremonial route is the permanent collection on the second and third floors.
MOMA's Permanent Collection
Its aura is unmatched, identified as the mainstream of modern art history.
Visitors expect masterpieces and turning points, such as Starry Night, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and Guernica.
Trustees, led by the Rockefellers, promoted an image of glamorous modernity and liberalism.
The collection received generous support and publicity, achieving institutional hegemony in art history, education, and galleries.
Acquisitions express a system of values, especially individualism.
Nineteenth-century art contained individualism within naturalism, using a shared visual language, whereas modern high art expresses individualism through unconventional visual languages.
Inner experience emerges as more real, with subjective and abstract languages indicating unique consciousness.
Visitors see a succession of works by uniquely established artists, conforming to the museum's art-historical scheme; artists gain significance based on their contribution to the overall scheme.
Works of art are perceived as moments in history, often viewed briefly (1.6 seconds on average), emphasizing their categorization rather than individual confrontation.
Permanent collection rooms are linked like a chain, with a prescribed route and secondary routes designating content subsidiary to the central history of modern art.
The program emphasizes moments and turning points, framing significant works in doorways and relegating less important ones to corners.
The history records dematerialization and transcendence of mundane experience, highlighting Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism.
The history begins with Cézanne, foreshadowing Picasso and Cubism (breakdown of tangible form), leading to Léger, Futurists, and Constructivists.
Other tendencies appear derivative or subordinate, such as Matisse, die Brücke, and Blue Riders.
The history detaches from the material world, marked by Kandinsky and Malevich, with the only window on the main route.
The third floor recommences with Guernica, representing the evolution from Cubism to Surrealism; Miró is presented as the prototypical Surrealist, reaching new heights of individualism.
The program extends to include American Abstract Expressionism, seen as the fulfillment of the historical scheme.
Spatial Experience
Small rooms display the permanent collection, with twisting routes and no clear sense of direction.
Only one of twenty rooms along the route has windows, despite glass façades, creating a labyrinth experience.
The museum's ritual conforms to the archetypal labyrinth experience, associated with death, rebirth, and spiritual enlightenment.
The labyrinth lies above the earth, with the exterior wall hinting at transcendence.
The design signals progress and rationality but has an irrational core, not corresponding to the interior space.
Visitors wind through narrow, silent, windowless white spaces that inhibit speech, creating an intensely private place.
The space is a 'nowhere', a blankness outside time and history, where the ritual is an internal drama.
The Role of the "Great Mother"
The gaze of the Great Mother finds you, often as goddesses of Picasso, Kirchner, and De Kooning; in Surrealism, she is a beast.
She poses the threat of domination, sometimes with beauty as a snare (Munch's vampire).
The labyrinth is her realm, most present at art-historical breakthroughs, personifying the dangers of the artists' route.
The goddess emphasizes engulfing, ensnaring, and petrifying aspects.
The Garden
Outside, her power is celebrated as a positive force, expressed by the swelling volumes of her massive body in bronze statues (Lachaise, Renoir, Maillol).
Cafeteria patrons enjoy her bounty, acknowledging female creative power as fertility.
Rodin's Balzac exalts male procreativity as artistic potency.
Inside, creativity is defined as a male spiritual endeavor, transcending the material world.
Salvation is alienation from the Mother and her realm, integrating with spirit and intellect.
Both Goddess and Mother are aspects of the Great Mother, who must be overcome.
Spiritual Path
Pictures lead along a spiritual path, rising to transcendence through abstract language and themes.
The second floor celebrates thought over matter (Cubism, Purism, de Stijl), light and movement (Futurism, Orphism), and mysticism (Suprematism and Blue Riders).
The third floor becomes mystical, with spirit eclipsing reason through Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.
Abstract forms and themes proclaim spiritual superiority, negating human emotions and needs; images of labor are mostly absent.
Love as reciprocity is absent, with distorted images of women.
The walk is through an irrational world, devaluing everyday experience as monstrous.
MOMA treats everyday life as irrelevant, suppressing it for spiritual enlightenment, leading to aesthetic detachment.
Enlightenment and Renunciation
Enlightenment in the labyrinth means detachment from material needs.
History and myth are renounced, leaving only transcendence.
The ultimate value is nothingness - the transcendent void.
The triumph of Abstract Expressionism is the triumph of spirit, completing the ritual.
The visitor experiences a traditional pattern of Western religious thought, portraying life as a struggle between material and spiritual.
The triumph of spirit over matter is a necessary alienation, equivalent to freedom in late bourgeois ideology, taking the form of aesthetic detachment.
Ecstasy, with liberation and elevation, is a characteristic moment of religious and aesthetic alienation.
The Mundane World
The everyday world haunts the labyrinth, with repressed realities returning as monstrous forces.
Irrational powers rule both worlds, with anxiety and self-doubt characterizing both.
The ritual glamorizes individualism and alienated relations, reconciling the visitor to pure subjectivity, equating it with the human condition.
Material needs appear as gifts from a nature goddess.
MOMA appears as a refuge from materialism, exalting values and experiences it rejects.
The ritual is a walk through mirrors, equating isolation, fear, and numbness as exciting states, reconciling the visitor to the outside world.
Notes
Museums produce ideology, focusing on the museum experience and realizing ideology.
Museums communicate authority, reinforcing social exclusion for non-visitors and identification for knowledgeable visitors.
Modern culture products, like art exhibitions, provide scripts performed by individuals, similar to rituals in traditional societies.
The separation between secular and religious has masked the survival of religious practices and beliefs; bourgeois society appropriates religious symbols and traditions, shaping the experience of art.
Iconography includes more than image-text correlation, mediating between ideology and subjective experience.
Original intentions of artists are less relevant than the reception and mediation of art.
Museums specialize in types, such as ethnic, regional art, and robber-baron mansions.
MOMA's international programs may have cultural imperialism effects.
MOMA promoted the International Style as the rational style of mass society.
The initial design has been altered, but the effect remains substantially unchanged.
Richard Oldenburg argues that first-floor galleries have nothing to do with the permanent collection, but special exhibitions reinforce MOMA's art-historical mainstream.
MOMA's new acquisitions are often of high art-historical importance.
I have omitted the notes sections at the end, and figure descriptions such as "Figure 5.1.1 Plan of first floor showing only ceremonial spaces (in white)"