You can see their point. We in Britain may be used to cultural regeneration now, but Queen’s is an echt urban wasteland of a peculiarly American, land-hungry type. A republic of car lots, distribution depots, battered pick-up trucks, tangles of girders bearing roads and rail tracks, and one excellent vista from the street just round the corner from the new MoMA. In the foreground of this vista, you get a sinister building with very small windows and razor wire much in evidence, described as a “Correctional Facility”. In the distance, right on axis, is the Empire State Building, looking impossibly romantic and unattainable in the shimmering, polluted air. Yes, this feels like exile, all right.

For all that the MoMA people make the right noises about reaching out to the people of Queen’s, about how they have become part of a vibrant local arts scene including the relatively famous PS1 contemporary art gallery, about what excellent restaurants there are to be found around there, it all sounds massively condescending and false. Because MoMA is not going to stay there. Its old home back in Manhattan is being hugely extended at a cost of $750m. It proved to be impossible to keep the place open with so much dusty and noisy building work going on. So the big empty factory in Queen’s, earmarked as a central store for the museum’s scattered collection, acquired new importance: for $50m or so, it could actually function as a museum itself. But not for long. Only until 2005, when everyone will gratefully scuttle back over the river, taking their Picassos and Pollocks and Warhols with them, and pulling up the drawbridge.

This is a shame, because the one great advantage to the new set-up is its sheer unexpectedness. This really is the shock of what used to be the new. Just opposite the entrance to MoMA QNS, men in plaid shirts in a warehouse are stacking boxes onto trucks. Just inside the entrance, you see Picasso’s mighty Demoiselles d’Avignon, enticingly revealed at the end of a corridor reaching into the heart of the museum. In this context, the work seems fresh and vulnerable in a way it could never be in a conventional citadel of fine art.