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Do you know anything?
the performance artist Marina Abramovic asked over the phone in late March.
For months, it had been the question on everyones mind: Who was going to lead MoMA now?
She asked him explicitly.
I could get nothing out of him, she said.
Many thought the museum would choose a woman.
Though speculation and rumor were rampant, no definite picture of the front-runners emerged.
Sources said the answer was unlikely to be divulged before May.
The news landed with something like a thud.
Never heard of him, J. Patrice Marandel, a former LACMA chief curator, posted on Facebook.
This reaction seemed to be among the more favorable.
Are we allowed to say that?
Though his work was respected, it was understated, and hed never held an administrative position at MoMA.
Among what little was known about him was the fact that he was liked by Lowry.
Many people believed hed been selected to continue Lowrys policies.
But a significant group meant it bitterly.
Its so predictable, said Bishop.
Dont Rock the Boat!
In short, people werent thrilled.
What a disappointing and unsurprising choice, a former high-level MoMA employee told me.
Their choices would also influence how museums and art institutions run, including how they bring in money.
Black remains a trustee.
Glenn was Darth Vader.
There was hope for a new director who would revive MoMA as a living, evolving entity.
But its sensibilities had seemed to calcify in recent years.
Some felt it had become tediously predictable: blue-chip name after blue-chip name.
The museum was falling farther out of conversation.
Nobody really talks about them anymore in the same way.
I hear much more about the Guggenheim; I hear much more about the Whitney.
MoMA had had a world of forward-thinking museum chiefs to choose from.
In her time on the business side, she directed MoMAs most recent, and massive, expansion.
Notably, Cherix has never run any institution.
Halbreich told me that prominent art institutions are already using code words, likecommunity,to talk about diversity.
To make the selection completely meritocratic.
For others, like Bishop, the takeaway was that ladies are allowed to spin up the margins.
Brooklyn, Queens, Studio Museum.
Wanting a guy in a suit.
Lowry himself had been pleased with the decision very proud, in Halbreichs words.
(Sarah Suzuki also completed this program.)
In his personal demeanor, he seems to be a far quieter presence than Lowry.
Hes not a flashy personality, the Princeton art theorist Hal Foster told me.
Hes not as glamorous as Glenn.
But I think that might be good in this moment.
Cherix, he said, was stable at a moment of radical instability.
Halbreich believes Cherix has so far been underestimated.
He looks like a man in a suit, she said.
(In fact he looks like a Swiss banker his twin brothers metier.)
But underneath, there is a roiling interest in the most rule-breaking artists.
Maybe unsurprisingly, his exhibitions have rarely been blockbusters, though his shows forEd RuschaandYoko Onocame close.
Overall, his exhibitions tend to catalogue history and bring overlooked works into the existing boundaries of the canon.
I know he was angling for it, he said, weeks before the announcement.
He was very clear about that in conversations with me.
What does this all mean for the future of MoMA?
But no one I spoke with would hazard any real predictions about his coming tenure and impact.
Some discussed the shifting landscape he would face.
Others were feared that the museum might let tech disruptorsincreasingly conflated with artistsin through the front door.
Cherix will also be handed a massive fundraising challenge.
The new director will need to appeal to this new generation.
The lobby was filled with collectors, writers, and the artists friends.
I loved the Ed Ruscha show, she said Cherixs 2023 retrospective.
But at this place you have to be a CEO.
Does he do that?
He also wasnt considered remarkably qualified.
His field was Islamic art history.
The eras preeminent directors had all turned it down.
And back then, among real art people, fundraising was considered drudgery.
But Lowry had unusual ambitions.
He wants to be an administrator.
Picking one artist over another to exhibit could raise the value of trustees own private collections.
When he arrived, the chief curators had extraordinary freedom over their exhibitions and set their own budgets.
The same article described the overhauled museum as streamlined and cash-fueled: Just call it McMoMA.)
The highest earning curators make around $500,000, all in.
Lowrys own package adds up to about $2.2 million.)
Much of the museum staff was outraged.
Curators, too, had complaints.
As Storr saw it, Lowry was too greedy.
He saw everything as a zero-sum game, he said.
Storr quit after seven years in the new regime.
I left before he could ensnare and torture me as he did so many others, he said.
He claimed that Lowry intentionally pitted staff against one another by playing favorites, by dangling prizes.
Some say Lowry was jealous of curators.
MoMA has previously denied this.)
Most former staffers I spoke with agree that the work environment under Lowry was cutthroat.
And every single exhibition looks great.
They recalled curators taking up cycling because Lowry loved to race.
In 2001, MoMA began its first expansion and renovation under Lowry, designed by the architect Yoshio Taniguchi.
It was completed three years later at the astonishing cost of $450 million.
Storr described Lowry as having an appetite altogether for power and for money not for art.
But throughout his seemingly acquisitive run, Lowry has surely brought innovative art to the institution.
MoMA and modernism in the sense of experimentation and the rejection of tradition have never been easy bedfellows.
The interplay between counterculture and the capitalists and their strife continues to define the museum.
In hiring Cherix, MoMA had made what was, in some ways, a deeply predictable decision.
I dont think MoMA wants to change, one person close to the search said.
The donor class has gone full Trump, the art critic Nikki Columbus said.
I doubt much of MoMAs board is any different.
What power the director really has, independent of the trustees, is also limited.
A leader who bucked board expectations could be removed.
Bishop put it this way: It really doesnt matter who the next director is.
Nothing significant will shift at MoMA while it remains at the beck and call of its billionaire trustees.
MoMA is the corporate museum par excellence, not an institution by and for the public.
Maybe it was all overdetermined from the start.
But the real outcomes of the decision are yet to be known.
That will be obviously in the face of nativism, in the face of anti-DEI measures, he said.
But I think its incumbent upon Christophe to continue that fight.
