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In threatening to demolish the Museum of American Folk Art, I asked, has MOMA lost sight of great architecture? Maybe even worse, has it forgotten its own role as a museum? What does it say that it is now using that alley between buildings for perhaps the ultimate descent of a great museum into Disneyland. (I mean the spectacle of Rain Room in a temporary shelter—and the more than three-hour lines leading up to it—and I shall tell you more about it soon.) Is art even a priority, and is architecture? What does it say that MOMA’s chairman, Jerry I. Speyer, is a real-estate developer?

Remarkably, even he feels the heat, and (thankfully) a recent post of mine is already obsolete. Under critical and public pressure, including petitions, MOMA blinked. Speyer announced in early May that it is reconsidering. That is not to say that MOMA will back down, and yet it may. For now, he calls the fate of the architecture by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien an “open question,” and at least the museum feels the burden of answering it. Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which has also overseen the conversion renovation of the High Line into a popular park, will now formulate a justification for the westward expansion.

Barry Schwabsky in The Nation compared the Modern’s earlier rationales to trashing a Kandinsky that clashed with the office décor. Williams and Tsien pointed out that one floor in fact aligns perfectly across the two buildings. One could imagine a creative connection, just as Yale University has now connected its art galleries, with architecture from past centuries to the present. Nor need every museum expansion be an act of destruction. For Yale, the Drawing Center, or Maya Lin at the Museum of Chinese in America and SculptureCenter, architecture has proved modest to a fault. With ICA Boston by the waterfront, Diller Scofidio + Renfro have already made a brand new building an act of urban recovery.

It could serve as a model for midtown Manhattan as well. I am sorry to see good architects paid to find an answer that the museum board wants to hear. Still, one can expect a sophisticated response. They must know that the threatened building could be at the center of an exhibition of contemporary architecture—the kind that the Museum of Modern Art puts on every day. When its architecture department recently exhibited Henri Labrouste, who designed the great libraries of Paris, did it sense the irony? Did the museum’s director, Glenn D. Lowry?

At The Times, Michael Kimmelman has formulated his own protest, and I could not have put it better: “a museum dedicated to contemporary art and design wanted to destroy a distinctive work of contemporary design.” And, he lamented, it probably still wants to do so. New York’s paper of record may have come late to the game, where once its critic led the ill-fated fight to preserve Penn Station. Yet has come, and now the pressure is on. “The stakes go beyond the Modern to civic health.”

I have been rude to Kimmelman in the past, far too rude, but for him urban architecture has been about urban spaces all along, and now midtown is reconsidering two of its finest public spaces. As it happens, the pressure is also on Penn Station. At the time of its demolition and sorry reconstruction, it received only a limited permit to house Madison Square Garden above it. If that permit lapses, change is in the air. Now the City Planning Commission has recommended against an indefinite extension. I have no idea what will happen to Penn Station, and I have no fondness for the idea of moving its entrance a long block west to the post office—but public spaces are my spaces, too, and I want them back.

Kimmelman has also done the debate a favor by quoting a “forty-something friend”—who could easily be me: “I used to spend my days in the previous incarnation of MoMA after my father died. Back then MoMA was my chapel. I would make my way to my favorite Rothko, and the progression from the street to that gallery in the old building didn’t feel like you were moving through a shopping mall or a W Hotel. It’s just not a place for New Yorkers anymore.” Maybe one day it will be again.

There has to be more to architecture than the clash of finances, egos, and ambitions. There has to be more to museums, too—but not, sadly, when it comes to the wars over the Museum of American Folk Art.

Not that it houses a museum. As you no doubt have heard, the Museum of Modern Art bought its next-door neighbor lock, stock, and barrel in 2011, when what is now the American Folk Art Museum decamped for smaller quarters by Lincoln Center. And the Modern intends to demolish the building, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien (more recently at work on the Barnes Foundation), for yet another expansion.

It will have had a short but remarkable life. Completed in 2001, it quickly won the World Architecture Award for best new building in the world, the Municipal Art Society Masterwork Award, and later the American Institute of Architects National Honor Award. No amount of prizes, however, could shield it from a different kind of architecture lesson, about finances and ambitions.

The ego trips began with the Museum of American Folk Art itself. It undertook its renovation in 1997, tempted by the lure of celebrity architecture and the promise of larger audiences. Nor was it alone. Just to list developments since then says something about museum politics and the pressure to aim high. To name only a few, the Met kept encroaching on Central Park and Fifth Avenue, the Morgan Library bridged from its old home to that of J. P. Morgan, ICA Boston covered the waterfront, MOMA assimilated P.S. 1 once and for all, Amsterdam’s museum district added what looks to at least one critic like a gigantic bathtub, the Guggenheim proposed another expansion on top of its toilet tank, the New Museum piled its white boxes on the Bowery, the Drawing Center sought a place at Ground Zero and then backed away, Yale University connected its art galleries, the Whitney announced its move from its Modernist classic to the Meatpacking District, and the Met promised to move right in. Yoshio Taniguchi started work on MOMA’s last addition to its empire in 1997, too.

In each case, critics swooned, before wondering in time whether the buildings add anything new or indeed work at all. Would the Museum of American Folk Art be any different? Maybe yes, in a building that somehow resonated with both Postmodernism and tradition. Herbert Muschamp, an apostle of the new, called it “already a midtown icon,” while Paul Goldberger, his predecessor at The New York Times and no stranger to the canon, praised its sensuality.
Still, the museum had borrowed $32 million to finance the expansion, and the bill came due all too soon. (It defaulted.)

Its neighbor to the east was already eying the property—and another expansion, designed by Jean Nouvel. The French architect’s first plans for the site rose slightly akilter to the height of the Empire State Building, windows crossed by enormous struts. To make it happen, MOMA under Glenn D. Lowry had snatched up two town houses and a hotel just further west. He offered to swap land, but the Folk Art Museum refused. It had not yet given up on its ambitions, and it clung to the walkway between West 53rd and 54th Streets, with again the misplaced hope of greater traffic. Lowry must have been delighted, with the chance in the end for a still larger apartment tower for MOMA that just happens to include additional exhibition space, mostly still to be determined.

“It’s not,” he assured The Times on April 10, “a comment on the quality of the building or Tod and Billie’s architecture,” and alas one has to believe him. Of course, that does not sound much like a reason to tear down a beloved building, so Lowry also questioned whether its façade conformed to MOMA’s “glass esthetic.” If a glass esthetic hardly describes the Museum of Modern Art that Taniguchi all but destroyed, he was plainly making excuses. Barry Schwabsky in The Nation compared it to trashing a Kandinsky that clashed with the office décor. Just how much has MOMA learned from the last expansion, with its failed spaces and lack of room for art. Is art even a priority?

That takes one back to the glorious enigma of the Museum of American Folk Art. One could call it hand-crafted or industrial, much like folk art and design. From the outside, a descending triangle cuts sixty-three silvery brown rectangles into three planes, only gaining mass as they reach the street between a narrow door and window. Inside, past the bronze and white copper, are still stranger collisions of green and white walls, wood floors, mottled stairs, and narrow corridors ending in pools of light. Martin Filler in The New York Review of Books calls its loss an “act of vandalism,” and petitions are circulating to save it. Yet it already seems almost suffocated between its neighbors, meaning MOMA, and not everyone agrees that saving it would be good for art.

Jerry Saltz argues that it could never serve MOMA’s permanent collection, not even small work. I would not be so sure. That collection includes outsider art and modern design, Lowry does not raise anything like that objection, surely all those prize committees had the sense to look inside the building, and surely no building could be that bad, not even Taniguchi’s. I hesitate to enter the debate, because Nouvel has had successes elsewhere—and because I had too little acquaintance with the museum in its sad and wonderful decade. Still, I have to caution Saltz or anyone, given the crippling past enthusiasms, the later disappointments, and the real story of insiders and outsider art, finances, ambitions, and egos. What does it say that MOMA’s chairman, Jerry I. Speyer, is a real-estate developer?

Note: as of early May, the museum blinks. The future is still uncertain, but I shall report more soon.

“Inventing Abstraction” could have called itself “The Invention of Abstraction,” but it is onto something. It is a show that has to reinvent itself with every room—about an art that had to reinvent itself every day.

It is an overwhelming experience, through April 15, and the subject of a longer review, in my latest upload. For just fifteen years, from 1910 to 1925, the Museum of Modern Art presents well over three hundred works—and not just painting and sculpture, but also film, music, and dance. It attends to that old sore spot in the museum’s collection, a dearth of women. It ranges to parts of Europe that one might never associate with modern art and, early and often, to England and America. It pictures a moment before World War I, when artists found it easy to cross boundaries, in geography as well as art. And then it shows them struggling against new limits.

In its conception, it takes one to the invention of MOMA itself. The journey can be more exhausting than exhilarating, but never boring. Neither the museum nor Modernism will be so easy to dismiss as a stale, oppressive institution again—at least until the next show. They will also be harder than ever to define. Half the point, in fact, is that one cannot define abstract art apart from who practiced it and who did not. Rather than movements or individuals, the curators speak of networks, and rather than pure form on the one hand or reinterpretation of reality on the other, they see connections across the arts.

Right out front, they cover a wall with a map of the connections, and it is almost as overwhelming as the show. Untold thin red lines connect more than eighty artists. Thirteen artists highlighted in red have over twenty-four connections apiece. Those nodes run east to Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Gonchorova in Russia, but also west to Alfred Stieglitz with his 291 Gallery in New York City. They include writers, like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Guillaume Apollinaire, and exponents of the anti-art in Dada, Tristan Tzara and Hans Arp. Two of the thirteen are women, including Sonia Delauney—here accorded her maiden name last, as Delaunay-Terk.

Sol LeWitt has nothing on this wall drawing. Nor do William Powhida and Marc Lombardi, with their witty charts and take-downs of the contemporary scene. Alfred Barr, MOMA’s first director, might have recognized it, though, for it takes off from the cover to the catalog of “Cubism and Abstract Art,” his defining 1936 exhibition. It even has Pablo Picasso at its center, along with Wassily Kandinsky, artists that Barr would surely rank first. Only it adds poets and musicians, while dethroning movements. Where Barr had influences and dependencies, with African art alongside Cubism, this network has only abstraction.

Inside as well, things start deceptively close to tradition. Picasso gets the first room to himself, for just two drawings and Woman with Mandolin from 1910. It is not the more familiar painting of Fanny Tellier, but one with no clear sign of a woman or a mandolin—”attributes” that he once claimed to have added only later. But then Picasso turned away from abstraction, because “you have to begin with something,” and he never appears again. Kandinsky contributes not in his evolution from nature in motion, but with a big canvas close to abstraction, Composition V from 1911. It took him months of hesitancy and dissatisfaction.

He had drafted his book, the chief curator notes in an impressive catalog essay, as early as 1909. Yet he did not so much as mention abstraction until a planned fourth edition. What happened in between? The key, MOMA argues, was attending a concert of Arnold Schoenberg and then poring over the score as a work of art. And by then František Kupka, a Czech artist working in Paris, had beat him to the punch, with perhaps the first abstract painting. Apollinaire called the style Orphism, after Orpheus—the musician of myth who followed his wife to Hades—and Kupka had a fondness for musical titles, too.

Can architecture finds its political voice? Where Modernism sought to remake the world, architects seem to be settling for real-estate values. They look up, with Donald Trump and Hudson Yards, but to luxury towers. They look ahead, but only to look back, to an abandoned freight line in Chelsea or a classic carousel in Dumbo. Instead of common ground, they seek gentrification and tourism. The personal is no longer the political, but the pocketbook.

Now the Museum of Modern Art, through March 25 (last chance!), wants to redo the math—by the simple expedient of counting on its fingers, and it is the subject of a longer review, in my latest upload. With “9 + 1 Ways of Being Political,” it remembers when modern architecture stood for something. “New modes of urban life had to be devised and the architectural imagination had to be conjured.” But something went awry. As economics took over from politics, the show argues, that left architecture in the service of the powerful, and change will take charting the landscape ever since. The curators, Pedro Gadanho and Margo Weller, thus lay out “fifty years of political stances in architecture and urban design.”

The story begins familiarly enough. The glass box began as an ideal, critics have long insisted, but it became a sad model of capitalist efficiency. Housing projects became not a means for integration into a functioning economy, but permanent holding pens for those who lost out. In response, architects have turned to “radical stances,” “iconoclasm,” and the “politics of the domestic.” But something is awry here, too. I quote the titles of three of the exhibition’s nine sections—and if they seem somewhere between vague, perfunctory, and jargon ridden, so does the exhibition.

Fifty years of trying have not brought about sustainable growth and American belief in the public sector, but you will see none of that here, although that leaves more than enough to consider. Even with MOMA’s recent “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream,” practicalities seemed much overdue, but “9 + 1″ dispenses with them altogether—except to make fun of those who depend on them. In two concluding videos, Andrès Jaque’s Ikea Disobedients navigates the aisles, while Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley watch a white male relax as his house burns down, they helpfully explain, “from the inside out.” (Well, duh, and is that a good thing?) It also retreats into nostalgia, despite the promise of a better future. One can practically hear Talking Heads singing “Burning Down the House.”

The third section is about deconstruction, meaning architecture of the late twentieth century influenced by postmodern philosophy. The entire show, though, comes off as a modest update of MOMA’s pioneering 1988 survey of that trend. The nine sections run chronologically and by theme, but with overlap that gets in the way of laying out alternatives. The very assault on Modernism as institution, in the opening section and a section about glass skins, seems stuck in a rut. Far too much retreats into fantasy as well. The second section focuses on fictional architecture, especially dystopian fiction, but almost everything on view remains unbuilt.

The fictions do contribute something—but by unsettling the whole plea for politics. Each section includes artists alongside architects, just as with the video, sometimes with little relation to architecture. Each section also has a wall label and thumbnail pointing to related work in the museum, adding to that broader artistic context. And art, including political art, always points to something beyond politics. The show wants to view architecture as more politics than economics or esthetics. It ends up showing all four as essential and interdependent.