As the world races into PostModernism's embrace, the mere modern is becoming code for ancient and/or defunct: "Modern Rock Radio" programs the prom music of thirtysomethings, and modernism generally predates color TV. And the age of the Museums of Modern Art is ending as surely as video killed the radio star.
While the art world scrambles to decide what comes next (Virtual Louvres � la Net?), a hard museum has retooled for the millennium in San Francisco. What makes the Mario Botta-designed digs cool isn't what people think of it but what it thinks of people.
This MOMA isn't so much a place to see the stuff that art is made of, it's a place to be that stuff: extending outward from an atrium that looks as if Botta had forsaken art history in favor of futuristic late-night movies, the sunlight-intensive SFMOMA's housing threatens to outshine what's housed. It's the interplay of light and structure, patron's bodies, shadows, and surfaces that acts out the continual, alluring flux by which art defines itself circa 1999. The underview of people traversing the fifth-floor catwalk - a translucent metallic grid arcing through space high above the atrium floor and top-lit by one mother of a skylight - is an exhibit in the truest sense, with the guests as exhibitionists.
Of course, we still demand of museums a byte or two of cultural truth amidst all these gigs of beauty. SFMOMA is all that and a bag of chips: as an ecology, it's less memory lane than thinking machine - and we're what's on its mind. Only in San Francisco would an exhibit be dominated by ultratechnoid office furniture. A future dream or perhaps nightmare, this vision of San Francisco culture exhibits how SFMOMA is already making a record of tomorrow: a pomo MOMA for real.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: US$7; discounts available. +1 (415) 357 4000, on the Web at www.sfmoma.org/.
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