There are always all sorts of real estate shenanigans going down in New York, but they don’t usually involve museums.  Now the Folk Art Museum is selling its building to MoMA and the Whitney is renting its building to the Met.  It wouldn’t mean much except that the two properties changing hands are signature buildings.  The Whitney, especially, is a building that’s indelibly linked with the organization and its collections.  I know that they’re currently building new digs for themselves downtown.  But what will we call the magnificent Madison Avenue building now, The Metney?

I can’t separate these museum buildings from their art.  I’m still haunted by memories of the old MoMA and the way particular paintings lived inside of it.  There was a special room for the “Water Lilies” with picture windows overlooking the courtyard that flooded the room with sunlight.  There was Oskar Schlemmer’s “Bauhaus Staircase” hanging, unimaginatively and perfectly, in the staircase.  And there was an exuberant Florine Stettheimer canvas with a loony frame tucked into a dead-end hallway within one of the larger galleries.  Each time I reached this painting, after winding my way there through larger, more monumental works, it gave me a jolt of happiness.  It was in just the right place.