Review: The Museum of Modern Love

The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In college, I spent a lot of time trying to think about Frank O’Hara’s poem, “Why I Am Not a Painter.” Part of that was because my father and O’Hara split the major Hopwood Awards at the University of Michigan in 1950 – Dad won for prose and O’Hara for poetry – so that difference in genre seemed personal. And part of it was for the poem itself: what might it mean to go after a similar artistic statement in paint rather than words.

This novel explores a real-life conceptual artist’s work. Marina Abramovic sat at a table in a New York gallery for 75 days, and hundreds of people sat across from her briefly to meet her gaze. She was “present” to strangers, and it was an event that resonated. I was surprised to hear that even my children had heard of it.

It was also, it seems, powerful for the thousands who witnessed it, and Heather Rose has set out here to transform some of that experience from the performance genre to the novel.

As a result, this is both an effort to reclaim Abramovic’s original experiment – what does it feel like to be present for anyone who comes before you? – and an experiment in genre. It’s a little bit of what O’Hara was doing in trying to bring a painting into his poem.

I love that ambition, and I love that this novel works as well as it does to make Abramovic’s work resonate. I don’t know whether I’d have been moved by the actual experience of it, but I do know that I appreciate having it brought to me through multiple perspectives – including Abramovic’s own (thought much of that, I gather, is fictionalized from her biography).

Conceptually, then, this is more than worth it.

As a novel itself, though, it has its ups and downs. Our main protagonist is a composer of movie soundtracks. And, as such, he is himself invested in the work of transforming the images of cinema art into musical art.

Arky Levin is carrying a deep sadness. His best friend and closest collaborator has died in a recent car accident, and his wife is slowly dying from a wasting neurological disease. What’s more, because she remembers how devastated her father was when her mother died in similar fashion, she has fashioned a legal care document that denies him access to her. She’s left him all the money and resources he needs to continue his art, but he’s not allowed to come see her.

I get why that situation has emotional power here – and I get that it sets up an emotionally effective conclusion when [SPOILER:] Levin finally insists on visiting his nearly unconscious wife and being fully present for her as Abramovic has been for him – but I can’t escape the deeply contrived nature of it. The genuine power that Rose gives this is diminished by the clear artificiality of the barriers she’s thrown up for Levin.

There are a range of other characters too, most prominently a gentle woman from the South who’s lost her husband to cancer and sought distraction in New York. I love the way she and Levin bond over watching Abramovic watch others, and I love the way Rose conjures a sense of community among those who have been moved by the experience.

That said, though, I think the second half of this begins to run a little out of steam. The intense focus of the beginning, when Levin and his new friend forge a connection of mourners who can’t quite name their pain, gives way to other sub-plots that deal more with the world of art, its making, and its marketing. The characters that emerge there are ones, as I see it, who are less affected by the experience of the art than by the work of creating it. All that still works, but without quite the same beautiful edge of the opening chapters.

In any case, this is certainly a strong and moving work. It’s a reminder of how hard it is to open yourself to another’s pain, and that’s worth exploring in every medium we have.


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