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The Modern Art Machine

The central figure in Fernando Domínguez Rubio’s groundbreaking book is the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), a 708,000 square-foot behemoth of serious art in hushed white galleries. These are the sorts of things people associate with art museums the world over, to be endured, perhaps, as the price of touristic edification, or, more optimistically, to be appreciated as correct devotion to the visual arts. Because of the sameness of the modern art museum—and we learn a lot in this book about the why and how of museal uniformity—it takes a few pages to understand the novelty ofStill Life.The white walls conceal a beehive of conservators, chemists, computer programmers, and forensic scientists striving to keep the artworks alive. For a work to be alive, in this setting, entails a careful balance betweenmaterial arrest and social regeneration. If, when we look at Van Gogh’s Starry Night, we perceive an unbroken connection with the artist’s intention, then the museum’s backstage workers have succeeded. It is, however, a temporary victory. The task of making “things” into “art objects” is unending. It is expensive. It is greedy. It neglects inferior works to make superstars of a small subset. For this reason, Domínguez Rubio argues, the art museum is not just a place to kill time or admire beauty. It is a “machine” [10], and the MoMA machine is one of the best in the business. With an annual operating budget of $267million and approximately 2.5 million visitors per year, MoMA is a cultural powerhouse. It owns 200,000 artworks, including 1,200 by Picasso alone, as well as the entire Andy Warhol Archive. It has propelled artists to fame, and can make or break the careers of curators, architects, and critics. Its power shapes and is shaped by the modern aesthetic regime, a defining feature of which is an “extremely narrow ‘regime of objecthood’”—or definition of what qualifies as an art object [44]. A frequent complaint about contemporary art is the loosening of material and aesthetic parameters that once governed artistic genres. Sculpted butter, piles of hard candy, messy beds, and farm animals suspended in formaldehyde are all, potentially, art. Domínguez Rubio acknowledges the infinite material possibilities, and then makes an important corrective: although almost “any-thing” can be art, not “every-thing” can be an art object. To be an art object is to be