VOA常速英语:纽约现代艺术博物馆扩建翻新后重新开放

More than three million people visit the Museum of Modern Art or MoMA every year. The museum was closed during a huge renovation that took place over the summer, but the entire space reopens this month. The renovation cost over 450 million dollars, adds 4,500 square meters in space, with room for some thousand new art objects. “One of my hopes is that it’s a clearer path of circulation that you’ll know where you are as you move through. My hope is that you’ll be able to get lost but run into something to know where you are exactly, but also a ground floor, I think there’s some huge change in the street level.” On the top sixth floor, there is a terrace and a cafe with a spectacular view, the fifth is dedicated to world masterpieces. Here visitors will find Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Matisse, Pollock and Warhol. The closer to the ground floor, the more modern art gets.

 “Instead of thinking about a principle of I have to get from A to Z in a straight line, that I have oodles and oodles of different opportunities between A and Z.” But even all the new space isn’t enough room for the 200-thousand art objects being stored here, and they’re all masterpieces of the past century and a half, including the first videos and photo negatives, so the new renovated museum plans to rotate exhibitions once every six months. “Well, I think the new MoMA is an extension of the old MoMA. One grew out of the other. This version of the Museum of Modern Art was embedded in an earlier version.” This is the fifth renovation MoMA has gone through in its history. Each time it gets more difficult because any expansion means agreements with city authorities, the mayor’s office and real estate agents. “Actually, we’ve run out of space, so we have to make the most of it. This block is very limited. We have a church on one side. We can’t really move, pretty much locked here.” But for MoMA, this is nothing, after all, the art it holds is immortal and only becomes more precious with time.