The freak show is coming to MoMA. No, it’s not Marina Abramovic getting naked there again: Starting Wednesday, MoMA will for six months exhibit the okay-looking 1895 pastel-on-board version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, the painting that made headlines last May when it was transformed overnight by economic alchemy from a work of art into “the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction.†That is, it was gaveled off for nearly $120 million to a “mystery collector,†rumored to be MoMA board member and Apollo Global Management CEO Leon Black.
Should we be glad that this quasi-icon will be on view? That depends on what “on view†means. The Times reports that security will be “extremely strict.†I imagine highly timed tickets, as well, with massive crowds filing past the pastel like folks before a dead president as he lies in state. (As if MoMA isn’t crowded enough already.) MoMA director Glenn Lowry calls this “an incredible opportunity.†I can’t deny that it is. This version of the work has never been seen in New York — it’s been sequestered in a private collection for years and could be going back to one, for all we know. So it might not pass this way again in our lifetimes, if ever. That’s a big deal, even if it really is Munch’s own copy of his original.
At MoMA, the work will be exhibited with a very small scattering of Munch’s work: eight prints and two of his paintings from the same period. I revere Munch. I love the original version of The Scream. In that mad thunderclap, Munch condensed a new psychology into this image — one of anxiety, alienation, otherness. (Atop the painting, he penciled in the words ONLY A MADMAN COULD HAVE DONE THIS.) His amoebic figure is suspended between limbo and life, the outer and inner worlds. The image deserves its iconic status, as earth-shaker and as fridge magnet.
And yet … I don’t want to argue against the chance to see this work in the flesh. Yet, a show like this — which is not a show but an event — here, now, is a case of MoMA indulging its spectacle-driven side. With (we presume) the best of intentions, it is flirting with the bad magic — the system that guarantees that obscene art prices are good for business. Perhaps they are. But we have to ask: Is that business, in turn, good for us? For art? I am not against collectors spending grotesque amounts on art. But I want it to stop mattering how much art costs, because price has nothing to do with quality, and talking about prices is totally boring. See you in line.