John Updike’s “Due Considerations” is a hefty book of essays and criticism written between 1999 and 2007 and compiled by the author himself. Like his previous compendiums, the articles give due consideration to subjects of a cultural nature, “à la Updike”. As always, the language is elegant, the learning is evident, the humour is original, and Updike is open, stating his opinions and prejudices directly while also inviting us to join the conversation.
All of these markers of a good essayist are evident in his article, “Invisible Cathedral: A Preview of the New Museum of Modern Art” (2004) where he poses a series of questions and asks us to respond to them. He sets the stage for the discussion by telling us that he is at the site of the as yet uncompleted new MoMA where all evidence points to a museum that will be “immaculate, rectilinear, capacious and chaste” and then wonders if perhaps more can be asked of a modern museum. Updike tells us that this museum is designed by Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, a man who brings his eastern sensibilities to the project and lets slip that Taniguchi told the museum trustees, “Raise a lot of money for me, I’ll give you good architecture. Raise even more money, I’ll make the architecture disappear.” Updike describes the effect that the building has on him during his tour of the site and confirms that “everything subtly floats”, the walls “dematerialize”. But is this “nothingness” ideal, he asks. After all, this museum does not present an “arresting silhouette like Frank Lloyd Wright’s top-shaped Guggenheim or Frank Gehry’s titanium extravaganza in Bilbao”, rather, it forms “an invisible cathedral”. Next Updike shifts focus, adding another element to the question “what more can be asked of a museum?” by suggesting that the original cathedral (the Christian cathedral) now shares its cultural capital with the art cathedral (the museum). He maintains that the new cathedral is invisible and highly self-conscious because art, “by its glow (allows us to) bask in the promise of a brighter, more lasting realm reached by a favored few - Saint Vermeer, Saint Pollock, Saint Leonardo.”
What are we to make of Updike’s conflation of the sacred and the secular, the ancient and the modern? Updike doesn’t tell us what to think, but in the end, he does suggest that an earlier MoMA, which housed a “relatively intimate collection of human-scale works in non-palatial rooms” was one of the museum’s charms and maybe this cathedral “may have sprouted too many chapels...We shall see.”
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