Most big art museums started off life as houses - rich people's houses, with rich people's art in them. This was as true in 1929 when New York's Museum of Modern Art was founded, as it was in the 18th century when the national collections of European countries were being amassed. Despite successive waves of rebuilding and expansion, MoMA always kept something of that domestic feel. No longer. It has become the world's biggest corporate office foyer. 75 years on, they have shoe-horned a 1940s Bell helicopter into a side atrium of the vast new rebuilt MoMA. There would be room for it to fly around the six-storey, 110-foot high main hall there. Perhaps attached by a wire to Barnett Newman's mighty rusted steel "Broken Obelisk" of 1963-9 that is the lynchpin of the whole museum. There is so much space here, they just don't seem to know quite what to do with it all. What's a gallery, what's a lobby? Hard to tell, when some unfortunate artists are forced to share a space with three sets of escalators, two sets of lavatories, and a lift.
MoMA has been rebuilt, almost doubling in size. The last big expansion was 1984. This time, rather than just adding on piecemeal, they have let architect Yoshio Taniguchi rethink the whole thing. It has cost $425m out of a total budget of $858m - which also includes the temporary museum they established in a converted factory across the East River in Queens, plus a hefty endowment to keep the new place running. In the process, MoMA has finally shifted its prevailing aesthetic from fashionable-modern domestic (lots of relatively small rooms) to chilly corporate gigantism. Never mind the helicopter. In the hangar-like spaces of the new Contemporary Galleries you could park your private Lear jet.
In this, MoMA is following two global trends. One is the burgeoning of big rooms for big art, the other is modern art as business adjunct. Contemporary art - which apart from large bronzes used to involve nothing much bigger than four men could carry - continues to get huger and huger. Industrial lifting gear is needed to shift and assemble it. Factory-standard floor strengths are needed to support it. Vast open, column-free spaces are needed for it to sprawl in. We have seen the giant spaces of the Guggenheim Bilbao and Tate Modern, and how they are juggled with the smaller, more intimate rooms needed for older art. MoMA had to follow suit.
The other trend is for contemporary art to become a tick-box item for the corporately wealthy. Long gone are the days when it was challenging, edgy, stuff. Virtually every big new office block, in London as much as Manhattan, now has its foyer art, and an awful lot of it is safe-modern American, from Pop to minimalism. This is why the new MoMA now feels like the ultimate corporate foyer. Its real foyer weirdly leads onto other foyers, with their white walls and slate or oak floors and quietly humming and rattling escalators. Most galleries are artificially lit. As novelist John Updike astutely observed in the New Yorker: "Nothing in the new building is obtrusive, nothing is cheap. It feels breathless with unspared expense. It has the enchantment of a bank after hours."
