Museum of Modern Art (Cycle III)

    MoMA2000
Open Ends
Cycle III (1960 to the present)

          The third cycle of MoMA2000, titled Open Ends, will focus on art since 1960, and will run from September 14, 2000 to February 13,2001. This revelatory series of exhibitions will offer visitors their first sustained opportunity to see the richness and variety of the Museum's contemporary collection in all medians. In anticipation of the opportunities for increased focus on contemporary art that will be afforded by the Museum's future building, Open Ends will assemble an unprecedented range of objects, images, and installations, from the miniature to the monumental, created and collected in the past few decades.
          Established figures of the past forty years, Andy Warhol, Lee Friedlander, Jean-Luc Godard, and many others--will be represented by masterworks that have already become world renowned, while the Museum's continuing commitment to emerging artists and movements will be powerfully confirmed. Many exciting works by younger artists such as Rachel Whiteread, Andreas Gursky, Gary Hill, and Mike Kelly, to name only a few--will be shown for the first time at the Museum.
          Among the themes explored by this cycle's exhibitions will be questions of boundaries and their breakdowns. This will involve highlighting cross-pollinations between the traditionally separate categories of sculpture, painting, photography, architecture, film, and video, and also examining the tensions between local identities or private autonomies and a global culture, involving shared media imagery. The displays will showcase new materials and processes, and contend with challenges to familiar notions of originality, unique object value, and individual authorship. Contrasts will also be established between creators of new utopian visions, as in radically reform-minded schemes for new architectural environments, and other artists that, often in photography and film, have given trenchant expression to the dysfunctional failings of present society. The fertile new pluralism and diversity of contemporary art and its creators will be amply on view, as will numerous recently acquired works of special distinction, such as Cindy Sherman's influential Film Stills or Gerhard Richter's 1988 series of paintings dealing with the Baader-Meinhof group of radical political activists.
          Examining a period in which the demise or viability of the idea of the "modern" and of "modernism" has been most intensely debated, Open Ends will show, with a bounty of acquisitions less familiar or even unknown to the Museum's public, the ongoing edginess of the debates in which modern art was founded, and the continuing engagement of this institution in collecting the art of our time.