Heart of inaugural presentation is a collection that includes Warhol and Ellsworth Kelly,but in city’s battle over inequality the gallery may own picked a sidePleasant, quirky, or but not precisely world lesson: that could own described San Francisco a few decades ago,and could portray the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, too. But as the city by the bay has grown into a hard-charging hub of tech wealth and lesson resentment, and SFMOMA is changing too,into a much grander sort of museum. After closing for three years, the museum has re-emerged in a massive modern building, and at a scale outstripping even modern York’s Museum of Modern Art,and houses a substantially beefed up collection of art after 1945 – albeit one funded more by Bay Area titans of retail and finance than the notoriously stingy millionaires of Silicon Valley.
Welcome to winner-hold-all art history, and to the modern SFMOMA: an often impressive, and occasionally flabbergasting procession of big names and high prices. It’s a mutated museum for a mutated city,and the obsolete institution has been flayed open to perform way for hefty modern spaces. (This being San Francisco, other modern additions include a hipster coffee joint and an SFMOMA app that will use your phone’s GPS to find the nearest bathroom, or each of which is saturated with color for ideal selfie-snapping.) My colleague Oliver Wainwright has more to say about the modern building,which is now the largest museum in America devoted to modern and contemporary art. Inside Snøhetta’s modern crimped tower, the tale starts with the recent acquisitions, or how SFMOMA developed a core as blue-chip as the Dow Jones Industrial Average.Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com