Calvin Klein ad morphs into New Museum ad on Houston Street

Well, I won’t be going to the New Museum today as planned because they have already given out all the tickets to the 30 hour free admission marathon. The ultimate brilliance of the New Museum may be their ability to harness the full corporate/media juggernaut that runs this town. Will “new” art be mostly about the art establishment creating a new brand? Will the New Museum serve primarily to give museum imprimatur to artists already ensconced in the commercial galleries? For those of us toiling in the shadow of the museum–literally in my case–the museum may represent a shining, but unattainable Oz.

The New Museum from my rooftop

Yesterday morning I climbed out my window and up the fire escape to photograph the New Museum from the roof. It is perhaps the best way to view the building, its off kilter boxes emerging amid the confusion of the elevator sheds, skylights, and water towers that define the rooftop landscape of lower Manhattan.

The New Museum building, designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the firm Sanaa, is, on the one hand, a pristine object standing aloof from the still very gritty Bowery. But viewed close up, the metal scrim, which glistens in the sun from a distance, is rather more utilitarian. As I wrote a while back in an earlier post, it has a provisional off-the-shelf feel unlike the richer materiality usually associated with museums. It is, after all, a institution dedicated to the here and now as opposed to the preservation of the past.

Thelma Burdick apartments

I took a number of pictures with the view camera, a few not including the New Museum. Running the whole block of Stanton between the Bowery and Chrystie is a low income housing project built during the ’80s composed of an endless monotony of brick and windows. This, too, is part of the neighborhood in which the New Museum now calls home.