For more than two years, the Museum of Modern Art has been exiled to a reconditioned staple factory in Queens as a sleek new MOMA, budgeted at a gulp-inducing $858 million, rose conspicuously in Midtown Manhattan. Meanwhile, out of sight in a shabby, windowless conference room in Queens, the curators of the painting and sculpture department have been playing with a scale model of the new galleries, debating how to retell the story of art in the 20th century. Most art museums sort and display their objects as trophies, but MOMA is a church. Its masterpieces, beyond their individual merits.…
