The Museum of Modern Art’s new website goes live tomorrow, here’s a sneak peek. About damn time too, that tired old website was in serious need of refresh. The New York Times reports that MoMA loosens up and branches out considerably;

“The era is one in which blogs, photo sharing, social networking, bookmarking and many other ways of creating art-loving online communities have become a much more important part of museum Web sites, led by places like the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (walkerart.org), the Brooklyn Museum and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which is so user-friendly that its site (imamuseum.org) contains a dashboard-like display with up-to-date information, like the size of the museum’s endowment, its daily energy use and the average time people spend looking at its Web pages.”

Go ahead throw them doors open, just for fun. I firmly believe that everything is going to have to open a bit more to make more, meaning? I think in some ways, the sharing of content scares the hell out of art institutions; perhaps this is a rant best saved for another time. Yes, the new site looks great, looks cool too, the MoMA digital design team worked with For Office Use Only to bring everything together. I hope they keep on top of content. It’s one thing to say that they’re starting to open, it’s another and more difficult commitment to remain so, grumble grumble the MoMA youtube channel gets an update once monthly. Does MoMA have a Twitter stream, I know the Brooklyn Museum does, and it’s a great one, 20,000 followers can be updated instantly…wait, MoMA has one too, but it only has 7,000 followers, hmmmm, that means, what?

One more thing, I was wondering if you’ve seen the Martin Kippenberger show? Run now, it’s genius. I remember seeing his “The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika” piece in the Carnegie International 1999? No big deal on the floor, but from a balcony, well, I won’t ruin it for you, it was in a word, insane! Anyway, I think Jerry Saltz sums Kippenberger’s work up quite nicely;

“For the past decade, the world has been dominated by a chilly mix of Warhol’s use of culture as material, Richter’s ideas about photographs and abstraction, and Richard Prince’s notions of appropriation. It’s an international style that too many people use to produce art that looks like other art. Kippenberger’s work is powerful enough to scatter that aesthetic weather system. It’s deeply imprinted with received theories about reproduction, popular culture, and photography, but it never feels like it comes out of a cookie cutter. He created his own theory and then blew it to bits. Skepticism was his weapon of aesthetic destruction.”