While working on yesterday's story about the new Renzo Piano-designed restaurant planned for under the High Line, we stumbled on this rather amazing video of the new Whitney posted on the Hight Line blog.

A version of this pic has been shown at various community events, and grainy pictures of the space have emerged on sites like Curbed, but seeing it here in its entirety is pretty jaw-dropping. As big fans of the original Marcel Breuer building, The Observer was sorry to see the Whitney heading downtown. Now it seems clear we are gaining as much of what might be lost—which really isn't lost anyway with the Met moving in.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Krens. (Patrick McMullan)

Last fall it was reported that the great Tom Krens was off the Guggenheim’s Abu Dhabi project, which seemed like big news because Mr. Krens was the creative mind and promoter of the project, but what’s even more strange is that we haven’t heard boo from the art world’s consummate museum showman since.

The Whitney Museum of American Art will soon abandon its architectural landmark on Park Avenue (it will be rented out to the Metropolitan Museum) because the Whitney is creating a new building downtown. The Dia Foundation just completed an $11.5 million purchase of a new building site in Chelsea (it will be the site of an all-new N.Y.C. Dia). All this construction makes me think of Tom Krens, the man who changed the Guggenheim forever, and influenced the world of museum construction in our town and around the world. Tom Krens has gone M.I.A., so it’s time to wind back the clock and think about his tremendous fall from grace, and what it might teach us about these other initiatives.

Back in ’97 Mr. Krens, the Guggenheim’s towering, N.F.L.-linebacker-size director, was at the top of his game. He had just launched the hugely successful Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Bilbao and in so doing had changed the art world forever. Quite an achievement for a guy from modest beginnings. After all, the young Mr. Krens was running only a little museum at Williams College in the late ’70s when he completed his M.B.A. at Yale: he cleverly leveraged it into a consultancy at the Guggenheim, eventually succeeding in getting himself hired as director.

He didn’t have a strong art historical background (he was originally an artist, not an art historian), and, thinking back, I can only wonder how desperate the Guggenheim board must have been in 1988 when they fired their exhausted director Thomas Messer and brought in a virtual neophyte to reposition the institution and fill its empty coffers. Fill them he did, by raising the endowment from $20 million to over a $100 million.

In the end, his arrogant manner and John Wayne swagger pissed off his major donor, Peter Lewis, who lasted 11 years as chairman of the board and gave over $70 million. Mr. Lewis felt the museum should focus on housekeeping at its base in New York rather than opening more Guggenheim branches around the world, and in a showdown befitting a true Western movie he threatened the board with an ultimatum: either Mr. Krens goes or he would.

In a shocker, the board stuck with Mr. Krens, though with their main patron gone—Mr. Lewis left the board in 2005—the Guggenheim’s budget was dealt a serious blow. Blockbuster shows were one way to get financing, and Mr. Krens did them in a big way, with motorcycle shows sponsored by BMW and a fashion show sponsored by Armani, as well as shows from Brazil, China and India. He found sponsors for a branch in Berlin (care of Deutsche Bank), and another branch housed and paid for by a Las Vegas casino (now closed) and he never stopped hunting for financing to open everywhere and anywhere he could.

Though Mr. Lewis rightly anticipated that Mr. Krens’s vision would eventually crash, a global vision is what made Mr. Krens special, and it’s what he’ll always be remembered for. With Bilbao Mr. Krens rewrote the recipe for a successful museum, taking his cue from the Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece in New York that is the Guggenheim’s historic home and talisman. In a nod to Wright’s genius, Mr. Krens put architectural spectacle first, by hiring Mr. Gehry and giving him free rein. He then put fund-raising second, by getting a local government to foot the entire bill, and he put brand building third, by creating a Spanish flagship that he could use to showcase his vision and pitch governments, corporations and anyone else who might pony up for future Guggenheim branches around the world.

What of art, I hear you say? Well, museum building at the end of the 20th century was in need of a makeover, and, right or wrong, the funding sources dictated that art alone wasn’t enough. Mr. Krens anticipated the need to boost attendance and create a tourist destination as well as an identity and a global brand. Let’s not forget that Bilbao is a crummy postindustrial dump in the center of Spain (almost as bad as Flint, Mich.)—the kind of place you wouldn’t go even on a paid vacation. But the Bilbao museum became the monumental success that changed the museum world forever, and it still boasts attendance of over a million people a year. I had the pleasure of touring the place in the fall of ’99 as a guest of Diane von Furstenberg and Barry Diller. We got the full celebrity tour from Mr. Gehry, including lighting up the flame throwers that spurt out of the water fountains. This was followed up by a little motorcycle spin with Mr. Krens and celebrity guests Jeremy Irons, Lawrence Fishburne and Lauren Hutton, all sponsored, of course, by BMW.

None of it had anything to do with “art.” It was about marketing, fund-raising and architecture as spectacle. I can barely remember the Warhol exhibit inside the museum, perhaps because it was dwarfed by the eccentric spaces that Mr. Gehry’s titanium-skin “baked Alaska” structure provided. Who cared, since no one was there to see the art. We were there to see the new “wonder of the world,” and to party. I wasn’t just overcome; I was overwhelmed by the ambition, the imagination and the chutzpah of this new godless cathedral.

In the years that followed, Mr. Krens tried to create new satellite Guggenheims around the world, including a huge one in lower Manhattan that never got off the ground. But despite the roadblocks, Frank Gehry became the most lauded and famous architect of our time. Sadly, I find much of his recent work grossly overrated, and though it was a great formula for Bilbao, it’s not a recipe that will work as well anywhere else. The fact that other museums have sought to hire Mr. Gehry over and over again to create their own “Bilbao monument” is a guaranteed recipe for failure, because what made Mr. Gehry’s building great was its newness, its originality, so by definition to copy the formula is to miss the point.

For these reasons and many more, the Abu Dhabi Gehry-Guggenheim museum will be at best a facsimile, and the two new proposed French Gehry museums, one in Arles and another in Paris (for Louis Vuitton’s Bernard Arnault), will also flop, if they ever see the light of day. It’s actually quite sad because there are so many great architects working today (think Herzog and de Meuron, Peter Zumthor, Thomas Mayne … ), it’s the perfect time to let some others have a go.

But there’s more to Mr. Krens’s formula than just a flashy building. First and foremost he understood the value of his own New York building’s identity. He restored and elevated the profile of the amazing Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece on Fifth Avenue, a building that never even pretended to be a great museum but succeeds 150 percent as architectural monument. Reliable sources tell me that, thanks to Mr. Krens’s branding strategy, 80 percent of the museum’s current New York visitors are foreign, and they flock in every year irrespective of what’s on view.

Compare this to the poor job done by the Whitney Museum of American Art. It is the owner of a fantastic brutalist Marcel Breuer masterpiece, a building that sadly has less than half the attendance of the Guggenheim, and 80 percent of its visitors are mere New Yorkers. To add insult to injury, the museum is abandoning its flagship on Park Avenue and renting it out to the Metropolitan Museum, because the Whitney is pouring all its resources into a newer, bigger, downtown Whitney designed by Renzo Piano, the volume of which will allow the Whitney to show more of its vast collection.

If bigger doesn’t result in better, the Whitney will have done New York a terrible disservice, one that could have been easily avoided if only it had raised funds by selling a few artworks out of its vast holdings. Isn’t the Breuer building a work of art, one that is more meaningful to the museum’s identity than any painting could ever be? Imagine if it had the vision to leave the “uptown Whitney” as a true museum of American Art, the only one in New York, where the museum’s amazing collection of Ash Can artists like Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler and George Bellows would be on permanent display. Would I care if the downtown museum were cut in half? Absolutely not. There is plenty of museum quality free art to see downtown in all the Chelsea galleries; who needs to pay good money to see any more of it?

But “de-accessioning”—the selling of artworks from the collection—is a no-no in the museum world. It’s also another rule that Mr. Krens broke early in his tenure. Back in 1990 he raised $47 million by selling off a Kandinsky, a Chagall and a Modigliani (the museum had several other works by these artists) and he acquired the fantastic Count Panza collection of minimalist art, thus making a quantum leap for the Guggenheim’s collection. Sadly, though, his programming overall veered so far from the museum’s original mission of showing “non-objective painting” (think Kandinsky) that it was hard to tell what to expect from him, other than the promise of a spectacle.

The other pieces to Mr. Krens’s museum formula include making space for plenty of restaurants and nice, big gift shops, and putting lots of emphasis on logos and advertising. And, of course, putting on mega blockbuster shows complete with celebrities, politicians and corporate sponsors. This very same formula worked like a charm for another art world giant, the dealer Larry Gagosian. He opened satellite galleries around the world and brought show business glamour to the stodgy and conservative gallery system, thus swallowing up many of the best artists in the world and providing collectors with a one-stop destination for almost all their art needs.

But money is what a gallery thrives on, whereas in the American museum world, fund-raising is a semi-secret part of every director’s job. Our museums run on private donations, so finding collectors or socially motivated patrons to pay the tab is a large part of every director’s responsibility, as it is in the world of private education and cultural institutions of all kinds. That’s in large part why our cultural institutions suffer outside of large cities like New York and Los Angeles. In bureaucratic old Europe this conflict doesn’t exist because museums are funded by the government and museum directors work for the state, so they are free to focus on the art, not on fund-raising. But in the U.S., with little state or federal support of the arts, museum folks are condemned to a life of panhandling wealthy patrons, to sell them a seat on their the board or to get them to host benefit dinners, cocktail parties and anything else that’ll bring in the tax-deductible bucks.

I’m not saying that the European system is always better—state-run institutions tend to become bureaucratic and didactic—but it is not fraught with the types of conflicts of interest that took down Tom Krens. Mr. Krens was guilty of finding every possible way to shortcut the fund-raising conundrum, and though he never was able to replace mega donor Peter Lewis, he did secure corporate and government sponsorship from Deutsche Bank, BMW, Hugo Boss and Armani, as well as municipalities like Bilbao and even whole countries like Brazil and China.

Sadly for everyone he eventually dead-ended, and the board finally pushed him out, by giving him a highly paid consultancy on a massive Guggenheim Abu Dhabi project. But his consulting contract was eventually dropped when hubris once again got the better of him, a sad ending to what has to be one of the most exciting and inspiring museum director sagas of the past 50 years.

Tom Krens succeeded in changing the art world forever, and, since his tenure at the Guggenheim, numerous new museums have been built as architectural monuments—Zaha Hadid’s Maxxi in Rome and Sanaa’s New Museum in New York, to name just two. These new cathedrals of architecture where some art will hang are inevitably focused on attendance, tourist traffic and boosting the local economy. The “bigger is better” mentality prevails to this day, even though many of the new buildings are oversize and over budget and end up looking like misguided monuments of excess.

Was this change for the good? The question matters not: change is inevitable because the museum system in this country was and is still in need of some shake up. Until a part of our state and federal tax money goes toward supporting the arts, it’s impossible to avoid conflicts of interest. Mayor Bloomberg understands this, and he’s quietly been New York’s number one patron, but that’s not enough. In the end Mr. Krens’s legacy will remain, and the status and respect he deserves as a museum visionary will one day prevail. I can only hope he finds a way to rise again and show the stodgy museum world a new twist on the very formula he created. Does “art” suffer when the attendance and the spectacle take center stage? Of course it does, but one way or another, the show must go on.

editorial@observer.com

The final price for the two plots on which Mr. Piano's crustacean-looking building will rise, 820 Washington Street and 93 Gansevoort Street, was $19.19 million, according to city records. That will come out to a little under $100 per square foot for the 195,000-square-foot building—well below the $200 to $300 a foot the neighborhood averages for building sales. Given the prime location next to the High Line, the Hudson and down the block from the Standard, James Nolen, a partner at Massey Knakal, believes the site could have fetched closer to $400 per square foot on the open market.

"The big thing about this site is there was a deed restriction for agricultural or meatpacking use, and it was city-owned, so it really couldn't be bid on by the fair market," Mr. Nolen said. "Obviously, whatever deal they got, the city felt it was good for the neighborhood and worth doing." Not to suggest that he does not like the deal himself. "It's a spectacular site, and this is very exciting for the area," Mr. Nolen added.

The Whitney and the city's Economic Development Corporation have not yet responded to requests for comment.

UPDATE: "Being that it's a cultural institution and we hold the development rights and there's a deed restriction for cultural uses, that is why the property is valued the way it is," an EDC spokesperson tells The Observer. The price was also slightly higher than the originally agreed upon $18 million because the Whitney exercised an option to buy a second piece of land owned by the city.

And just to clarify, we were pointing out the Whitney got a good deal, which is not to say that it is not deserving of one. The Observer agrees the last thing the Meatpacking District needs is another boutique or boutique hotel. The Whitney gift shop not withstanding.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

The Whitney approved a $680 million expansion plan into the meatpacking district last spring, after years cramped in an overhanging Brutalist beast of a building on 75th Street. But there was a catch: Cosmetics heir Leonard Lauder apparently has a soft spot for concrete, and gave the art gallery $131 million only on the condition that it not sell its historic Marcel Breuer-designed home.

Rumors have abounded since last spring that the Met would rent the entire building. After more than a year of negotiations, the two parties are close to a deal, sources say.

Even though the Whitney's move is still a couple of years away, the two parties will need time to orchestrate the move, so there is some pressure to get the deal done early. Sources also said the building may become a museum-size exhibition space dedicated to post-1960s art or may house the Met's contemporary art collection. They note that a collection with a more contemporary edge would suit the building's Modernist design.

No brokers are currently involved in the transaction. Neither parties' press offices returned calls for comment.

lkusisto@observer.com

Mr. Meyer--who has famously breathed new life into such staples as the hamburger and the barbecued rib--reinvented the idea of a museum cafeteria several years ago, launching the restaurants in the rebuilt MoMA and creating a draw that rivaled the art itself. Soon, every cultural institution in the city was ditching the chicken fingers for small plates and other refinements. But instead of repeating himself, Mr. Meyer has created the museum cafe that isn't, a hybrid of Norman Rockwell and Vito Acconci on the plate.

"We don't think of this as a museum cafe," Chris Bradley, the executive chef, formerly of Mr. Meyer's Gramercy Tavern. "This is our version of the Upper East Side coffee shop, the Greek diner, though through the filter of someone who has been through 11 years of fine dining," said . Mr. Bradley said the goal is to strip down his cooking to its simple, homey essence. "We will be making our own pastrami, but we won't be poaching eggs with agar or doing anything sous vide," Mr. Bradley promised.

That said, Untitled is aimed not merely at tourists popping in for a bite between the Edward Hopper show and the Glenn Ligon retrospective, but at local residents. And yet this is the Upper East Side, a neighborhood where the default dining is haute French, overpriced Italian or Chinese takeout, and where the meals are as starchy as the collars. Will the gallerists, shop girls and ladies who lunch really come around to kale, chewy, pies imported from the banks of the Gowanus and nose-to-tail dinners on the weekends?

"Our main goal is to attract our neighbors," Mr. Meyer said. "If we're not doing that, we're not succeeding."

The bigger challenge they see is not conquering palettes but preconceptions. "Pretty much anything on the menu, you are going to have something to base it on, and some of them may be very emotional experiences, for example matzoh ball soup," Mr. Meyer said. "Or the milkshake, people are going to say my mom made it better. Everyone here is going to have a view on pancakes. The goal is not to make the best pancakes in the world. The goal is to make the most thoughtful coffee shop that we can make."

"Now you're making me nervous," Mr. Bradly blurted out.

Curators Barbara Haskell and Sasha Nicholas present Edward Hopper at the Whitney along with 34 of his American contemporaries. The comparisons straddle the first half of the 20th century: the Ash Can School, the Precisionists, Paul Cadmus' Sailors and Floozies of 1938 (which depicts Tom of Finland-like sailors being accosted by loose women), John Sloan, Paul Strand, George Bellows with the greatest boxing painting of all time (Dempsey and Firpo, 1924). Hopper's teacher Robert Henri is represented by an obsequious odalisque of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. In My Egypt (1927), Charles Demuth celebrates a grain elevator in Lancaster, Pa., by comparing it to an Egyptian pyramid, all light and angles.

What becomes clear in all this company is that Hopper himself is a loner. It's not that his time was a lonelier time, although it may be tempting to think of it that way. He was a stand-alone artist. Some people are like that, too. Hopper is that kind of person. Private. People who don't see themselves as surrounded by a cloud of friends. People who consider participation in larger social movements as a form of submission to a reduction of character and refuse to be reduced. There's a stoic individualism at work in Hopper's pictures, present in the loneliness of urban people and the independence of objects that's relevant today.

Don't get me wrong. Hopper isn't an outsider. The world he painted covers a familiar territory, from the West Village to Cape Cod. A youthful self-portrait, painted in 1903 when he was 21, reveals a patrician young man in a somber suit, snub-nosed, soft-lipped and slack-jawed. He grew up comfortably middle class in Nyack, N.Y. Hopper channeled Degas during his first decade back from studying in Paris. New York Interior (1921) explicitly imports the 1870 Degas painting Interior. In it a disheveled, half-dressed woman lit in lamp light mends a garment. She lives in a room crowded with pictures and a clock, a stark apartment too small and shabby to contain the sinewy pale beauty of her naked shoulders. Later, his focus zooms out a little, taking in street scenes and storefronts, and then he becomes an American Atget, our painter of early-morning urban scenes before the action happens. In 1930's Early Sunday Morning (the best painting in the show in the conspicuous absence of the Chicago Art Institute's Night Hawks), long shadows and a stage-set quality monumentalize Seventh Avenue South. As for descendents, an unlikely one may be the painter Maureen Gallace. Hopper's early Queensborough Bridge (1913) prefigures her glacial brushwork on the bridge and simple deft sufficiency in the shed.

As the show makes clear, Hopper grows increasingly nostalgic. In the 1930s, while painters are celebrating skyscrapers and cars and the angular delights of modernity, Hopper's reaction to the modern is to stake out a timeless urban streetscape or rural view. He retreats to the countryside and paints small towns and American scenes: abandoned morning streets, loading docks, rooftops, under bridges, barns. He makes much of shadows, and his palette is predisposed toward the complements red and green. He tends to be voyeuristic, staging his paintings through windows or from above. His figures are solid, and his compositions emphasize the geometry of the everyday. He likes women in impossibly tight dresses; men rarely escape the costumes of their profession; and public places promise no interaction (for this reason he repeatedly painted the lonely movie theater in his neighborhood). He painted the quality of light with adjectival precision-cool electric light, thin morning light, the lonely light from a cinema screen. (If Hopper loved movies, the movies loved Hopper back: In his House by the Railroad [1925], we see the inspiration for Hitchcock's Bates Motel in Psycho).

The show is stacked in his favor. Other artists end up looking noisy and glib, their work ephemeral. Hopper weathered a storm of new styles with remarkable conservatism and consistency. A second self-portrait from 1925-1930 shows a more confident Hopper. Six foot five and blue-eyed, he has the steady gaze of the man about to become America's painter of the 1930s and '40s. This is one point of view. One could also say that Hopper missed the great and transformative waves of Modernist styles that buffeted and defined the art of the '10s through the '50s. The show gives us the unlikely experience of seeing Hopper the great loner in the context of his friends. Those who make art, who write, who engage in any kind of solitary work that relies on a point of view and time and a certain distance from contact, that relies upon individual intelligence, might relate to his position.

editorial@observer.com

They want to turn the Whitney into the city's first, and perhaps the world's premier, museum dedicated to architecture. Considering this is New York, the idea makes a good deal of sense:

We are all consumers of architecture, and if we treat it like garbage collection, gratefully relegating it to the margins of our attention unless it goes wrong, we wind up with the surroundings we deserve. Cities and suburbs can only be as dull and oppressive as we allow them to be.

An architecture museum done right would help cultivate a public that, in the past decade, has been shocked into caring about building.

The shock he is referring to is the events of 9/11, which indeed seemed to be a turning point for design awareness both in New York and across the country, one that only continued through the real estate boom as architects became showmen and marketers.

Though let us not pretend that a lot of lowest-common-denomentator dreck wasn't hastily thrown up to make a quick buck, as well. Which is probably why there will never be a full-scale architecture museum in the city, at least on the Whitney site. Though, really, do we need one at all?

The skyline is our museum, the reminder of the highs and lows. We've been getting on fine for more than a century without one, building bigger, brasher and sometimes boring-er with each passing day.

As Davidson points out, "Architecture is the aesthetic side of New York's abiding obsession -- real estate -- yet the city lacks a comprehensive museum to tell that story." And that will probably always be the case, because someone with more money and idle plans, like the Met, or Gucci or Fairway, will come along with designs of their own, for a "higher and better" use.

Yet so long as we keep building, so long as we never turn into Paris, New York will survive and even thrive. Our best art has always been in the studios and on the street, and there it should remain.

Related: The Whitney Through the Years. >>

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

The museum previewed its plans for the site with the community last night, and both The Journal and Curbed were on hand. The former reveals that the museum is 70 percent of the way to raising the $680 million it needs to complete the
project. The latter had some additional details about the design and, more importantly, some blurring pics and video of a fly-through of the museum.

The biggest news is the striking, as yet unseen western facade, with its huge, Hudson-facing windows. Perhaps Piano meant them as an homage to Marcel Breur's unusual openings at the current Madison Avenue museum. We've been trying to get a copy of the rendering from the museum all day to no avail, so this grainy screen grab from a shaky video shot by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation will have to do.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

SLIDESHOW: The Whitney Through the Years

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

The 40th anniversary of the Trisha Brown Dance Company finds the choreographer's company re-staging long-dusty parts of her repertory all over town: at the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art and on the rooftops of New York City. But of these performances, the Whitney's "Off The Wall Part II: Seven Works by Trisha Brown," starting this week and running through Oct. 3, will showcase the broadest assortment of work; the installations combine sound, performance and video, some of which has not been performed in decades. What, exactly, does it look like? Think dancers crawling, running, leaning, falling, writing, drawing on the floor or performing a striptease behind the transparent glass of a Marcel Duchamp. "We are letting Trisha inhabit the museum in a way that is much more expansive than a 7 o'clock performance," said the Whitney's adjunct curator of performing arts, Limor Tomer.

The Whitney, surprisingly perhaps, has showcased experimental dance performances before, most notably from Ms. Brown, Deborah Hay and Merce Cunningham. One of the Brown pieces, Walking on the Walls, was born on the walls of the Whitney, and the distinct roles that both the museum and choreographer have played in the history of performance are being reprised together. "I am looking forward to going back through time and seeing the early works at the Whitney," said Ms. Brown, now in her 70s, in an email. "This museum is part of my past, an important part of me."

Ms. Brown was a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater, the informal group that pioneered postmodern dance in the '60s. She became to postmodern dance something like Max Planck to quantum mechanics--it would have happened without her, but it might have looked quite different. She took pedestrian movement further than her peers in choreography, sometimes climbing up the wall in the process. In the '80s, she collaborated with Robert Rauschenberg and Laurie Anderson.

Most anticipated in the "Off the Wall" exhibition is Ms. Brown's 1970 work Man Walking Down the Side..., performed this time by a woman. Ms. Brown's description of the piece: "Gravity reneged. Vast scale. Clear order. You start at the top, walk straight down, stop at the bottom." So, dancer Elizabeth Streb will stride down the exterior of the Whitney on 75th Street at 5 p.m. on Friday, and Sunday at 1:30 and 5 p.m. (A well-known male dancer, Stephen Petronio, will also perform it at other times. The piece will be visible from Madison Avenue, and no admission is required.) Ms. Streb, who keeps a photo of the original piece on her desk at home, said she's honored to do it. "I would do anything Trisha told me to," she said. The first time she saw the piece, "I was 20. [Afterward] you had to sit in a room and think, 'How can I possibly make a move after this?'"

Walking on the Walls, performed at the Whitney in 1971, was an indoor version of that site-specific piece, brought into the museum as if to inaugurate the addition of postmodern dance to the canon. Many fans of Ms. Brown have only seen this and other groundbreaking work of hers in videos and still photos. Never performed again since its premiere, Walking will be redone in the original Breuer space seven times during the four-day exhibition. (At the Whitney this week is the second part of a two-part show; part one was curated by Chrissie Iles.)

Curator Ms. Tomer said that Ms. Streb's performance "is like closing the circle ... a vindication." Putting together the exhibition, she found the piece "as radical and fresh as it was 40 years ago." Rehearsal director Dianne Madden, who has been with the company for more than 20 years, had not worked with much of the material before and said she was surprised by its range. "There is a piece that is just a soundscape, there is a piece to Bob Dylan, to the Grateful Dead. There are pieces in silence. There's humor." She said she believes the exhibition is more than a reprise of groundbreaking performance. "It will reveal something about where we are now in dance," she said.

editorial@observer.com