Voiceover: People will be talking about the Museum of Modern Art this summer.
Talking this way, “Say, what is this museum anyway?”
It’s the museum of the present day, art in our time, a dynamic museum!
Have they got any architecture?
The biggest exhibition of low-cost housing ever held!
What about photography?
There’s an exhibition of famous photographs.
Got any movies?
Yes, a film library, presenting a history
of motion picture art.
New show every day
(sirens)
Newscaster: Fire breaks out in one of the nation’s treasure houses.
Six paintings are lost or damaged.
Many others are scooted to safety by employees undaunted by the fire.
William C. Seitz: What goes on in these works of art are essentially perceptual experiences.
Does not conform with physical facts.
James Baldwin: It is the whole effort of writing
in the face of the American state seeming
before your eyes to crumble.
It becomes absolutely trivial, that one feels that one should be doing something else
like storming barricades,
doing something which seems like action.
David Wojnarowicz: Imagine what it would be like if friends had a demonstration
each time a lover or friend or stranger died of AIDS.
We have to find our own forms of gesture and communication.
We can never depend on the mass media to reflect us, or our states of mind.
