Moments from Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

MoMA opened in 1929, eight days after the stock market crash, on the strength of a bet that most museums of the era considered reckless: that art made in living memory was worth hanging on walls before history had settled the question of whether it mattered. Three women largely drove it into existence, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan, and its first director, Alfred Barr, organized the collection around a theory of how modern art actually moved, a chain of influence he famously sketched as a kind of flowchart with arrows running from Cezanne through Cubism, Futurism, and De Stijl toward abstraction. That diagram still shapes how the fifth floor reads today: it is arranged less like a highlight reel and more like an argument.

The crowds gather around a handful of works, Starry Night, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, The Persistence of Memory, and if you want to actually look at them rather than photograph the backs of other people's phones, go right at opening or during the free Friday evening hours run by UNIQLO (which, counterintuitively, are calmer than a Saturday afternoon once the initial rush thins). The real payoff is in the rooms nobody lines up for: the photography and print galleries, the design collection with its actual helicopter and Olivetti typewriters, the film library. Read the wall texts here more than you would elsewhere. Barr built an argument into the hang, and the labels are where he explains it.