The Old Thinking Behind the New Museum’s Expansion: Review

The New Museum has always had its finger on the pulse. Since its founding in 1977 in New York, the museum has chased the bleeding edge in contemporary art, looking to showcase what’s happening before it happens. It’s the gallery where hot artists surface first, before they find the limelight in Basel or Miami or Venice, or at establishment museums uptown. Even its location today on the Lower East Side signals something important about the New Museum’s mission as an upstart space that delivers downtown cool.

Future visitors may never know it. For over 20 years, under visionary founder Marcia ...