Going to MoMA for the first time since the pandemic started, I was reintroduced to the museum's visitors' solemn quietness deference. It is like walking into a church where art is God and religion at the same time.
Looking at the art pieces spread across the museum's broad and ample galleries, it felt like going through the remains of a civilization. Never before the 20th century felt this distant. According to observers, 9/11 marked the beginning of the 21st century by dramatically changing the geopolitical world order. The pandemic, the most significant social experiment ever made, changed us. And this unprecedented experiment is still running.
Visiting a museum in the context where we are living is now is a totally and radically different experience. And the Museum of Modern Art, the meeting place of modern and contemporary, suddenly becomes somehow ancient.
From Van Gogh to Duchamp, Andy Warhol to Jeff Koons, and the latest acquisition, more than 26.000 artists work are in the museum's collection. The collection includes an ever-expanding range of visual expression, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, photography, architecture, design, film, media and performance art. Everything is there; every critical piece of modern and contemporary art is represented at MoMA. Browsing the half-empty galleries– the museum is working on reduced capacity due to the pandemic–feels strange and eerie. After 15 months of different stages of lockdown, being among people inside a closed space makes you feel uneasy, which only makes the whole experience more surreal.
Watching people quietly observing what's on display, you realize that they look like survivors going through the wreckage of our postmodern world– quietly sorting out the debris of what society leaves behind after being decimated.
To me, it felt like the ultimate confirmation of the ending of an era. The end of the world as we know it. So far. It might have happened many times before in history, but I've never experienced quite like this in my lifetime.
Like most of us, over the last 15 months, I wondered many times when we are going back to normal, or if will we ever?
If it's true that our civilization is fully represented at MoMA, then there's no going back. We won't ever look at these fragments of life the same way. That’s because art is only completed in the viewer's eyes, and our eyes won't ever be the same.
It makes me wonder if these art pieces won't gain an entirely new meaning now? And by just proposing this question to myself, MoMA seems more alive and relevant than ever before.