The Met gets a second chance to get contemporary art right

Two images haunt the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s engagement with the contemporary. One of these is the famous Life magazine photograph of 15 New York School artists—the so-called “Irascibles”—who protested the museum’s conservative stance toward contemporary art by refusing to submit work for the exhibition American Painting Today, 1950. The other image is the “torpedo diagram” created by Alfred Barr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern