There are many venues in New York that deal with contemporary art practices, but the New Museum is perhaps the best in this sense. First of all, the museum, founded in 1977 by former Whitney Museum curator Marcia Tucker, declared a radical approach – every ten years the collection was to be completely renewed and only living artists could be exhibited here. That plan was never fated to come to fruition, but it still gives way to the young, which requires considerable effort on the part of the management to raise funds to support art that no one else knows about. But it was here that the first exhibitions of William Kentridge and Paul McCarthy took place before they became widely known. The Bowery Museum building, designed by Kazuo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA, also deserves a special mention. It resembles a child’s pyramid of stacked cubes that seem to shimmer and shimmer, an effect created by the anodized aluminum mesh that covers the building.
