A great deal of thought and writing has been committed to American art museums: their histories, their concepts, their explicit and implicit messages, their politics and business practices. I have a deep interest in this chatter, I’ve contributed to it in the past and plan to again. But what of the museums themselves? The artworks, their placement, the hallways, the exhibits, the choreography of passing through?

In Adorno’s essay “The Valéry Proust Museum,” he weighs the literary accounts of trips to the museum from the sensitive and serious craftsman Valéry, and the excited, amateur flâneur Proust. Adorno judges the former superior, if tragically so (“Valéry’s loyalty to the objective demands of the work forces him to give up culture for lost”), but I confess I have far more in common with Proust who “holds on to culture for the sake of objective happiness,” even if tragically so.

In these reflections I endeavor, if not exactly to conjure one or both men, to set aside the critic’s ledger and engage my senses in the halls where the senses reign.

I’ll admit something I probably shouldn’t: I did not visit MoMA after it reopened in November 2019. I was busy, I was travelling, I’m allergic to Midtown. I swear I was going to get around to it. For reasons contemporary readers will immediately understand, and which anyone who digs this up, say, 10 years in the future will be baffled by, I didn’t make it until last week. The whole affair is a dizzying admixture of familiar and novel. The metal detectors, two bag searches, and temperature check are jarring. I barrel into the lobby and march confidently in the wrong direction at least three times before landing on the right kiosk to enter the museum proper.

I have the distinct feeling that I don’t know what MoMA is. I’m not sure that MoMA knows what MoMA is. This is its second renovation in less than two decades. I can conjure distinct pictures in my mind of every New York museum, but MoMA, even when I am at MoMA, remains unformed, more like a point on a map than an entity. There is no ritual of approach, you just walk down the sidewalk and then you’re there, and there keeps changing.

Corporate-type furniture is piled up in the Atrium, which, some helpful wall text points out, is art. Embodied Sensations is a participatory installation by Amanda Williams. There’s a Big Brother–style projection on the opposite wall beaming commands like “Begin to move erratically” and signage on the floor reminding me to social distance and that this is my space. It’s the kind of soft authoritarianism behind the govern me, daddy! orgasmic prostration to Cuomo’s press conferences a year ago.

I do not come to art museums to be so brazenly directed. Of course there are rules, concessions of a few freedoms in exchange for the privilege of being with art. I’d probably be tackled to the ground if I lit a cigarette right now. (The thought of such pointless transgression is absolutely delicious.) I’m grateful to Williams for making so palpably unpleasant the exact points at which my whims and impulses are checked by my well-honed museum manners.

Frustrated and put upon, I am less a genteel flâneur and more a Situationist on dérive. I lilt toward the garish charm of Jeff Koons thinking, this is the best thing in here because it’s precisely the thing we deserve. It’s not that there’s not good art in the 1970s–Present hall. There is. It’s hard to see. There are too many things shouting at me all at once (often literally, the galleries reverberate with disembodied soundtracks) to dispose me to really look at anything.

There are some unexpected joys: two pictures from Vivian Browne, a towering canvas by Jack Whitten that makes me feel like I’m being swallowed up by its abstract cityscape as I move closer. There’s a lot of humanity in these galleries, in ways that I was hard-pressed to get from Sol LeWitt’s idea art or Rirkrit Tiravanija’s play kitchens in previous installations. I’m glad that we seem to be moving away from blind faith in the tale of Conceptualism as the fulfillment of modern art. But it turns out that narrative is not something a museum installation can dispense with wholesale. The galleries, arranged by rather arbitrary themes (“True Stories”; “Transfigurations”), are a crowded, noisy mess. With historical time turned to confetti, identity is recruited to form a flat, tired narrative that hammers out the individuality and complexity of the art and artists. Frustratingly, there seems to be no way to see each space in this arrangement without doubling back, wandering about, feeling always behind or ahead of the plot.

Then there is the Seth Price I distinctly remember seeing over ten years ago in one of its first showings at the New Museum, back when it was contemporary. Now it’s somewhere between contemporary and a vintage trend that’s come back too soon for comfort, like those TikTok kids wearing bucket hats. The work, Essay With Knots, is Price’s 2008 crafty version of his 2002 artwork in the form of an art historical essay, Dispersion, that was de rigueur for the with-it student of art back in my day. Dispersion was an expression of the early aughts’ euphoria of the internet, conceptual art freed from its last nagging tie to materiality, the dream of networks as liberation. It’s a particularly ironic inclusion today, when right-minded progressives have deemed free, decentralized dispersion an existential threat.

A quartet of steel monoliths from Richard Serra are a welcome reprieve from that heady exercise. I make a half-hearted attempt at a selfie, but a band of pretty young things marches in and, embarrassed, I immediately abandon the effort. A great many artworks and ideas that felt fresh, new, and exciting when I got into this endeavor are no longer so, and neither am I.

MoMA seems embarrassed by the art of the past, which it keeps up in the attic. If one wanted to walk through history here he’d have to ascend all the zigzag escalators and then work back down, a route I’ve often considered but never taken. The whole thing is in tatters; no matter which way you go each route is a mix of predictions and memories, balconies looking over other galleries, anachronistic hangings. It’s less intoxicating than intoxicated, sending me stumbling through half-connected synapses.

Several visitors have arranged themselves in a politely socially distanced line to see and photograph Starry Night, which seems such a small, desperate thing holding its own against the force of all that adoration. The other pictures in the gallery go mostly ignored; they’re just sideshows for the main event. The contemporary galleries below seem positively empty compared to the overstuffed antique shop upstairs. I notice that I am not the only visitor drawn to the windows in the galleries, looking out to the street in a desperate attempt to orient myself in the city, or maybe in time, as my attention flags.

A Wade Guyton inkjet print incongruously hung in a Dada gallery jolts me awake. The glitchy work of an inkjet printer in collaboration with Microsoft Office is meant to be in conversation with Duchamp's experiments in chance but it’s less interlocutor, more internet troll. It looks like a cheap poster marked with crease lines put here by mistake. Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages and To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour make happiness of accidents; they make dance partners of chaos and control. Guyton’s 2017 X Poster finds no such potential in the technological errors it exploits, only jaded delight.

MoMA, appearing itself rather jaded, finishes its postmodern turn by folding history over on itself like a cheap sheet of paper and letting a crappy piece of machinery churn out whatever smeared ink it may.

It’s hard to be the Museum of Modern Art when the modern has become a thing of the past and a rather suspect thing at that. How do you tell a story of art when you’ve decided to keep the concept of history at arm’s length? How do you entice people when you believe that a pile of furniture and a set of dictatorial commands is an inclusive gesture? When I pass the windows over 53rd Street I can see a small band of protestors gathering in spite of the rain under the banner of “Strike MoMA.” I’m tempted to pick up a piece of cardboard and join the picket, although almost certainly not for the same reasons.

My salvation arrives in an unexpected place. I’ve spent 15 years refusing to really look at Monet’s Water Lilies. I was afraid I might like them. Conceptualism made an enemy of the senses and jeered at anyone who would be so pedestrian as to care about such trivialities. But they aren’t so trivial, are they? It’s my senses that are in collapse after two hours of bombardment by all of the art of the past 150 years blended up and spat back out at me. Monet seems to understand. These aren’t pictures of pretty gardens, they’re a tug of war between reality and its capture. The moment I think I’ve recognized a recognizable contour, it floats into abstraction. I could look at them for days and never see them. I’ve seen them for 15 years and never looked.

Finally satisfied, I venture outside to check in on the Strike MoMA activists who have been outside and online tossing around a demand to “abolish MoMA” for several weeks. They’ve staged some rowdy protests, but this is very tame. Teach-ins are given on Third World struggles, with an emphasis on international collaboration. It’s not the most sophisticated politics but I’ve seen worse.

Inside the museum there’s some really good stuff, some stupid optimism, some wonders of humanity, and some dumb politics. That’s what I see outside, too: a group of young people gathering to learn about the world and figure out what they think about it. Isn’t that what all the “museum professionals” keep writing puff pieces about, anyway? MoMA and its adversaries need each other. Each generation of outraged activists affirm the Museum’s own sense of cutting edge political import; the Museum gives the self-styled radicals a theater in which to playact a struggle. Neither party seems terribly interested in the art.

Previously in this series: An Afternoon at the Met