Programme Details

The Museum of Modern Art in New York - simply known around the world as MOMA - reopens later this week after being closed for a two and a half years for an $800 million facelift. The museum has more than doubled its size to accommodate fresh displays of contemporary art, especially new video and film art and installations. MOMA opened 75 years ago with the radical idea that new art could be as exciting and significant as the old. Its brief was to keep abreast of the rapidly changing face of contemporary art and trace the recent history of the modern movement. It has been struggling ever since to keep up with the new whilst preserving and describing the beginnings of the modern art. Is the idea of a museum of modern art a contradiction in terms?

In tonight's Night Waves: Undercurrents Paul Allen and guests discuss the influence of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and debate the notion that modern museums and galleries around the world have become the sole arbiters of artistic taste in contemporary society. How genuinely popular are the artists chosen to be represented in the gleaming new art houses like Tate Modern and the Guggenheim in Bilboa? Have the new curators and museum directors with their millionaire backers in big business become more important and powerful than the artists? And how do artists themselves respond to the constraints of the modern gallery and how dependent on these galleries is the new generation of installation and video artists?

Paul Allen is joined by the director of the Whitechapel Gallery in London Iwona Blazwick, the critic and curator William Feaver, the writer and former museum director Julian Spalding, and the sculptor Bill Woodrow.

Should modern art rely so heavily on museums and what is its future?


Night Waves: Undercurrents, Wednesdays 9.30pm, live on BBC Radio 3.


Presenter: PaulAllen
Producer: AnthonyDenselow