But since rich people have always collected and displayed art in costly interiors, what's changed? MoMA was founded by just the same ladies-who-lunch - one of them a Mrs. John. D. Rockefeller - as those who support it in their thousands today. The Rockefeller name is prominent on the new buildings. MoMA has no state subsidy, so no wonder - even with all those hundreds of millions of dollars in donations and sponsorship - it costs a steepish $20 to get in, except for a couple of hours free on Friday evenings. This place was always elitist. Avant-garde art was never for the masses, who always preferred their Old Masters. They go to the Metropolitan Museum instead.
Given all of which, one thing shines out from the new MoMA like a beacon of hope on a foggy night: it is not a self-conscious architectural icon. Taniguchi is a 67-year old minimalist (in the sense that all Japanese architects of a certain persuasion seem like minimalists to Western eyes) who has never previously built outside Japan. Some eyebrows were raised when MoMA selected him rather than one of the other fashionable names on the shortlist such as Rem Koolhaas or Herzog and de Meuron, Bernard Tschumi or Steven Holl, all of whom can be depended upon in their various ways to produce a landmark building. Taniguchi has done something different. He has designed a Stealth building, like an exquisitely-detailed mid-town equivalent of an out-of-town retail shed. Enormous though it is - now taking up the best part of an entire city block - it is perfectly possible to walk right past it without really noticing it. With its flush walls of black glass and matt-black granite, it is that smoothly unobtrusive.
So this is one art museum that - though it may be as corporately austere as Mies van der Rohe's nearby 1950s Seagram Building - does not try to steal the show from the art. New MoMA is big, but it is anything but flashy. It is a ground-hugging, six-storey set of linked boxes arranged around Philip Johnson's restored 1953 sculpture garden. This is now overlooked, east and west, by the two identical white-hooded boxes of Taniguchi's extension buildings. You can now get right through the museum from one side of the block too the other on a broad pale-green slate internal boulevard.
Taniguchi talks about "metabolising" the old museum. Well, the best-known bit of the original museum was the international-style modernism of the white marble-clad 1939 building by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone, with its perforated roof canopy. Taniguchi has metabolized this, plus subsequent additions by Philip Johnson and Cesar Pelli, into a great big thing that uses the 1939 building as little more than a section of façade. Inside, apart from a retained original stairwell, you get no sense of it.
New MoMA represents spending on an awesome scale, and all in the best possible taste. The sequence of spaces is adroitly handled. Internally all the mass of the building seems to dissolve, thanks to Taniguchi's use of shadow-gaps, razor-sharp stainless-steel architraves, and artfully positioned windows everywhere. This has become a channel-hopping museum, to dip into here and there. Its design and architecture section is now much expanded up on the second floor: so sadly you no longer find a Jaguar E-type in close proximity with Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, as you did in the hugger-mugger surroundings of the temporary MoMA QNS out at Queen's. So - again like Tate Modern - the new MoMA has become a place not so much for the intimate encounter with art, as for the grazing herds of tourists who will sweep through, paying cursory attention before heading for one of the several tempting money-spinning restaurants. And of course the new shop with its pricey high-design artefacts, designed by architect Richard Gluckman.
Verdict time. It is good that a big new art museum should set out to be a neutral, even deferential, container for one of the world's great collections of modern art and design. But it is not good that it should feel so much like the sterile corporate HQs of its sponsors.
It does not have to be this way. For my money, if you want to capture some of the freshness of mid-century American art in particular, the place to head for is not this perfect Manhattan art mausoleum, but somewhere a bit more rough-and-ready. Catch a train a few miles up the Hudson Valley to the town of Beacon. There, in an immense old factory that used to print cereal cartons, you will find the new contemporary art museum known as Dia:Beacon, run by the Dia art foundation. With minimal alteration, the factory with its high ceilings and saw-tooth rooflights has provided a setting for contemporary art that approaches the sublime.
In contrast, it is clear that the new MoMA just had too much money to spend. In its way (saving some botched construction details that you would not find in Japan) it is exquisite. It is the latest must-see in New York. But it somehow manages to have absolutely no discernible character. Shock of the new? More like the chill of the morgue.
