The New Museum, which opened yesterday, injects architectural excitement into a parcel of the Bowery near Prince Street that remains dingy despite near daily pop-ups of condo buildings. It’s noble the curators steered clear of uptown hotspots like Museum Mile and have attempted to introduce art in an otherwise cultural wasteland. Avant-garde architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa have designed a building that looks from afar like a stack of blocks balanced awkwardly by a child. Up close, the facing that appears solid gray from a distance is revealed to be metal mesh cladding the building’s surface. Floor-to-ceiling glass on the ground floor, home to a shallow lobby, lends levity and odd street-level views down Prince.
Inside, the excitement wanes. The galleries feature stark white walls, florescent tube lighting and already-cracked poured-cement floors. And regarding the art itself, I’ll let this graffito from a seventh-floor stairwell speak for me.
I’m not entirely sure this wasn’t an actual artwork because the New Museum is one of those contemporary art museums where it’s unclear whether that fire extinguisher you’re attempting to fathom on an artistic level is part of the exhibit or simply a device that one uses to extinguish fires. Either that or the art resembles, as Kelly put it, stuff you’d find in the back yard of a guy who just got arrested on Cops: a bottle-cap studded mattress, a tube light driven through an old couch, a sort-of artful arc of worn wooden chairs, a homeless-man-style clump of cardboard boxes, paint-slopped sculptures featuring plastic army guys, Transformers and, as Tritia noted, a strangely robust amount of Ikea furniture.
The museum’s biggest captive audience by far clustered around a teepee-like structure of long unfinished wooden boards to which were affixed a web of what appeared to be Salvation Army T-shirts. Its spindly legs had given out and the art had collapsed like an exhausted spider. Museum personnel, including a flushed man who gave urgent updates into his walkie-talkie, attempted to re-erect the thing, at one point resembling the marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima, until it became clear none of them knew how the art had been positioned initially. They ended up solemnly carting the bundle off into the elevator, probably to reassemble it someplace less shameful.
We completed our visit to the museum with a hike to the top floor, a glass-walled penthouse-lounge that had been completely overtaken by sponsor Target, plastered with logos and a bank of cabinets inexplicably filled with corporate-colored junk food: mini candy canes, cinnamon Mike and Ike, red and white Jelly Belly jelly beans, Atomic Fireballs and yogurt-covered pretzels. On the narrow terrace skirting the building outside were beautiful views of the sun setting over the city and blinding spotlights splashing the Target logo-colors all over the place. I can’t begrudge Target too much, however, because they were responsible for everyone getting into the museum for free yesterday and today. Otherwise, I can’t recommend the $12 general admission.