Upstairs, in its sixth-floor galleries, MoMA has installed its first temporary exhibition, "Contemporary Voices: Works from the UBS Art Collection," a show of 64 works that were initially assembled by MoMA boardmember Donald B. Marron, who bought the art for PaineWebber, the brokerage firm he sold to UBS for $12 billion in 2000. Though "amazingly strong" for a corporate collection, according to Times critic Roberta Smith, the show is "pre-approved and risk-free." What's more, many of the best works (by Lucian Freud, Andreas Gursky, Damien Hirst, Howard Hodgkin, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Sarah Morris, Sigmar Polke, Neo Rauch and David Salle) are being retained by UBS for its own holdings. "It is too bad," Smith remarks drolly at the end of her review, "that the Modern didn't have the time or energy or space to mount a truly full-scale examination" of the art of the late ‘70s to the early ‘90s.

Over in Artforum magazine, the tone of the coverage of the new MoMA is set by Todd Eberle's dark and brooding cover photograph showing an Alberto Giacometti figure and Joan Mir's Moonbird in the museum garden, framed to eerie effect by silhouetted, drooping beech branches, as if the museum were some ruin in the jungle. Parsing the articles inside is a more daunting (and dare we say masochistic) task, considering the slack and self-indulgent writing. Columbia University architecture dean Mark Wigley admits that MoMA has taken "a quantum leap forward," but complains about the museum's visitor brochure, and says that the "quiet architecture gets in the way." A partisan for his field, Wigley clearly feels that architect Yoshio Taniguchi's design is too subservient to the art (though, contra Ouroussoff, Wigley likes the architecture and design galleries).

Yve-Alain Bois, until recently the head of Harvard's art history department, takes us on a dyspeptic tour of the museum, bitching about almost everything he sees. The spaces are too large, too regular and have too many doors, sculpture is too little represented, the installation is too pluralistic and has "no punch, no rhythm, no strong movement." Picasso, Pop, post-war European art and political art are all poorly served. Overall, Bois notes a "curatorial timidity" and "loss of nerve" that he attributes to the "no ripples, please" principle of corporate culture. Bois also writes something about museum trustee Ronald Lauder demanding (or not needing to demand) that five works in the contemporary galleries be credited as his gifts.

Most interesting of all is the essay of Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, whose affection for crypto-Stalinism can be seen in his feverishly eloquent critique, from its praise for exhibitions of Rodchenko and the "Russian Avant-Garde Book" to its complaints about "pluralism" and what he calls "the inevitable contradictions of the liberalist-pluralist model." Utopia and emancipation have been discarded, he proclaims, in favor of "spectacle and warfare."

A spokesperson for the museum greeted the negative remarks with equanimity, noting, "I guess that's why they're called critics."

Now, CUNY history professor Mike Wallace, director of the Gotham Center for New York City History, has penned a historical critique of the show in the New York Review of Books and also posted an online analysis of the show's politics, titled Business Class Hero. As it turns out, the affection of today's capitalist class for Hamilton makes perfect sense. According to Wallace, Hamilton opposed the Bill of Rights, favored the rule of well-bred elites (and once proposed a "president elected for life") and had a "thirst for military glory." As new U.S. Treasury secretary, Hamilton favored a measure that profited speculators -- the new class of "paper aristocrats" -- over Revolutionary War soldiers. The exhibition, by omitting any sign of commerce, agriculture or manufacturing, Wallace writes, provides "a stockbroker's-eye view of the economy."

Meanwhile, Dia:Beacon is investigating the possibility of building a special structure to house the installation that Bourgeois made for the Tate Modern Turbine Hall in 2000. Titled I Do, I Undo and I Redo, the three large steel towers are about 30 feet tall, and feature platforms at their apexes surrounded by mirrors.