MoMA’s "Greater New York" Captures the Good & Bad of NYC

Like the Whitney Biennial and other pulse-taking surveys of contemporary art, Greater New York was conceived as a way for MoMA, via its PS1 satellite, to put its institutional stamp on the zeitgeist by measuring it through a recurring interval of years—every five in the case of “GNY,” a figure that once might have marked seismic shifts in the art world. Today market indexes have replaced stylistic revolutions as cultural barometers, the reason, perhaps, for why the exhibit’s current edition seems to frequently insert the past into the present, both as a subject and as an opportunity for resurrecting careers.