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Entry: The Customer is Always Wrong Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_customer_is_always_wrong#16646 Post contents: Delightful article. A native New Yorker and voluntary exile in Maryland (!) I try to visit little old New York as often as I can. So for our 38th anniversary, sweet wife and I and friend son spent three too-short days there. Since I haunted the Metropolitan, the Frick and MOMA in my far-away single days, I took spouse and son to visit MOMA for i'd heard it got a major facelift. This I wanted to see. And so I beheld a fraction of the collection, the scar-tissue covering modernist wounds wrought in Englightenment salons and in Verdun's trenches. They still evoke my wonder at the fecundity of lostness, of Huis Clos. I'd read about the renovation of the MOMA Garden in which I'd spent many happy, solitary hours: a serene oasis in Midtown. What a dismal surprise. To be sure, the architects, perhaps under David Rockefeller's guardian gaze, managed to preserve some of the old grace. But blotting out all was a desperately awful installation of one of Richard Serra's works, Circuit II. The ugliest possible rust-tinted metal, about eight-to-ten feet high wove darkened pathways through the Garden. I believe Mr. Serra's idea was to show how canyons of steel darken lives. Tell me now, why on earth should a fine little source of serenity and reflection be allowed, even for only a few months, to host a hostile "work of art?" The curators doubtless believe that the scabrous ugliness of American media culture should let loose their degenerate stench in the halls of the Muse. Sorry, World, these stewards of culture say, but the lesions of Neitzsche's hate speech must resonate even there. Quousque tandem abutere nostra patientia, Voltaire, Diderot and Comte? Francis Lawrence Sent at: 2008 07 09