So I finally went to the new Museum of Modern Art

And yes, it's much bigger and airier, but maybe that's what's wrong with it. The building was designed to be a bigger building, with bigger spaces, and that's it. Lots of outside views, but the views on the art not so good.
Since MOMA has this great art collection, why wasn't the building designed around the collection, instead of around itself?

The only room that really works is the one full of Matisses. And that's not only because the Matisse paintings are glorious. It's because the room fits the scale of the paintings and vice versa.
Everywhere else the scale dominates the paintings and disperses them in a white box desert. Big paintings don't look big anymore when the walls and space around them are way bigger.
The atrium, for example, fits the giant Broken Obelisk perfectly, but it has Monet's giant Waterlilies against one monstrously humongous wall, so gargantuan that this grand painting is lost, reduced and mimimized: like a postage stamp fixed to the side of a bus. Poor Monet. In the old MOMA his painting was fabulous to look at, but not here.

One good thing about the big scale is that MOMA's old fascist master narrative of Cubism being the prime moment of Modern Art has at last been diluted and in fact destroyed.
There may be no narrative anymore, but there are gaping holes. Where is Russian Constructivism, or Kandinsky's foray into abstraction, both greater breakthroughs than Cubism ever was? Where is Surrealism? Where is post-World War II European art, especially German art? No Anselm Kiefer, for example, which would have complemented the Obelisk in the atrium nicely.

What there is a great deal of, is American triumphalism in the shape of, yep, Abstract Expressionism. You'd swear nobody else painted between 1945 and 1970 but Americans. Where is Lucian Freud? Only one Joseph Beuys (a terrific one, though).

Hey, I'm still going back there. After all, there's nowhere else so packed with treasures. I could look at those Matisse paintings for hours.
At $20 a pop though, it might be a good thing to become a member for $80. If you go more than 4 times a year, you start saving. There will be enough new exhibitions to make that worthwhile.
And the contemporary art is interesting. But again: where is installation art? Very little. And where is video? I saw only one. MOMA is beginning to look old-fashioned in its essentialness, kind of like the NY Times. It's time for another Guggenheim to get built, if only to show installation and video art, of which we get to see precious little in museums outside the Chelsea galleries (and American pieces at the Whitney).

Question: what indeed would a museum look like that showed only video art? Whatever it would look like -- a challenge for Frank Gehry -- it would be a damn interesting place to get lost in. Someone, please build it. We'll come.