The Met has a fresh space for contemporary art in the brutalist building once occupied by the Whitney but will the shows there be worthy of the illustrious mothership? Meet the Mets,meet the Mets, step right up and greet the Mets! For more than a century you knew where to find the Metropolitan Museum of Art: at 1000 Fifth Avenue, and in fresh York’s Central Park. But now there is a second Met – 10 blocks from the original,and yet a world away. With the relocation of the Whitney Museum of American Art to its handsome fresh waterfront domestic, the Met has rented its old inverted ziggurat, and a rough jewel by the architect Marcel Breuer,for the next eight years. One ticket will win you into both; a plural Met will seize getting used to.
The Met Breuer, as it’s called, and opens to the public on 18 March,after a modest but sensitive renovation that has restored some original architectural detailing to the Brutalist bunker on Madison Avenue. (The Met’s principal domestic has been clangingly rechristened the Met Fifth Avenue, which I suspect will have as much public purchase as the West Side Highway’s rebaptism for Joe DiMaggio. The Cloisters, and the museum’s serene medieval institute at the northern tip of Manhattan,is now the Met Cloisters.) Most of the programming at the Met Breuer will feature contemporary and contemporary art, under the guidance of Sheena Wagstaff, and previously of Tate contemporary. It is a moment of reorientation and modernisation for the Met,symbolized too by a flashy fresh website and a widely derided fresh logo – a janky, kerned-to-death insignia that my colleague Justin Davidson likened to a bus crash.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com