Just as Los Angeles celebrated the completion of Richard Meier’s lavish travertine marble Getty Center in 1997, an art compound generously endowed by the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City unveiled its plan to commission Yoshio Taniguchi for its own expansion and renovation. Emblematic of the late twentieth-century boom in museum planning and building, their insistently modernist design at once reveals its origins in modernism and modernization, and belies its place in, and reliance on, a resolutely postmodern present.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the transfer of cultural wealth from Europe to America, coupled with burgeoning industrial fortunes, allowed for the founding of America’s own art museums in its major capital cities—from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

During the course of the twentieth century, modernization and modernism saw their messianic destinies intertwined in the founding of such institutions as the MOMA in 1929. There, the fortunes of American capitalist enterprise, the clean lines of Bauhaus design and the secularized modernist teleology of Alfred J. Barr came together to form the premier institution of modern art in America. Yet these founding visions of modernist utopia quickly gave way to the forces of cultural ossification. In its pursuit of originality and the relentlessly new, in its avowedly progressive vision, the museum refused to acknowledge the degree to which it conferred upon the present the very mantle of tradition which that present had sought so desperately to escape.

The cutting edge issues and exhibits of museums in the Northeast and California are refracted in other smaller art museums across the country. Some, like the Chicago Institute of Art, Baltimore’s Walters Art Gallery, the Albright-Knox Collection in Buffalo and the Menil Museum in Houston, constitute important collections and buildings. Others recur in circuits of major travelling expositions—Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta or Cincinnati. Still others have revealed interesting facets of their city and collector—the idiosyncratic Barnes Collection, near Philadelphia, or New Orleans Museum of Arts’ exploration of the links between Degas and his New Orleans relatives.

In the early twenty-first century we witness not the museum’s ruins but, instead, its triumphantly vigorous presence. In an age of blockbuster exhibitions and expansion, the museum has become entrenched as a cherished cultural icon unto itself. In a postmodern present marked by the accelerated pace of planned obsolescence, the museum has emerged as that institution which might save society from the ravages of modernization, from the relentless pursuit of the new, its processes of ossification, of memorialization, coming to function as a potent antidote to the logic of late capitalist culture.