Temples of the Ideal

John Updike on the new MOMA: “It used to be said that airports were our new cathedrals, the spires replaced by ascending and descending planes. But they have become workaday and shabby, cluttered with the machinery of heightened security and menaced by airline bankruptcy—bus terminals on the brink, more like refuse-littered marketplaces than like places of worship. The art museums, once haunted by a few experts, students, and idlers, have become the temples of the Ideal, of the Other, of the something else that, if only for a peaceful moment, redeems our daily getting and spending. Here resides something beyond our frantic animal existence.”

One Comment

  1. I still think it’s shopping malls. I’m trying to imagine the girl in Zola’s “Au Bonheur des Dames” saying the our father in the MOMA, or any girl on Laguna Beach, for that matter.

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