The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose: book review

The Museum of Modern Love  (2016) is set in 2010 in New York City. It is part fact, part fiction. This is ‘not the story of potential’ but a ‘story of convergence’ – something that ‘once set in motion, will have an unknown effect.’

The narrator is an music teacher writing about one of his students, Arky Levin, who composes music for films, with three Oscar nominations.  But he ‘has not been himself for many months.’ Arky’s wife Lydia had just left him. Lydia had asked him to keep one promise, but it was a devasting one, and he has not been able to focus on his music.

Levin goes to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) for inspiration. A 64-year-old woman is sitting next to a sign: The Artist is Present – Marina Abramovic.

Marina Abramovic, the artist from Serbia, is silent, unmoving, as she sits immobile in the museum’s atrium while spectators sit opposite her. No one knows that for Abramovic, sitting is painful, stillness is an illusion of calm, for she’s been having hallucinations since day one: ‘inside a war has begun.’

The official photographer of Marina’s exhibition, the archivist Marco Anelli, promised to capture the face of everyone who sat opposite her. He didn’t think it would be many. He never envisaged that there would be a queue – people woud sit for two minutes or two hours or the whole day: the length of time was determined by the sitter.

Jane Miller’s husband Karl had died, and she was visiting MOMA when she noticed Arky Levin watching The Artist is Present – Marina Abramovic – one of the greatest art events in modern history, because it is Abramovic’s longest-duration solo performance of her career.

To Levin, ‘something about her was as alluring as polished wood or light catching a sleeve of antique silk.’ He didn’t want to leave. Her performance event lasted 75 days.

This is Levin’s search for connection. Over the course of the MOMA performance event, Levin meets people watching the exhibition, and he slowly reflects on his life, the separation with his wife Lydia, and what it means to be committed to an act of love.

What is art? ‘Art will wake you up. Art will break your heart.’

This unique story explores the concept of art and how it connects and resonates with people on different levels. Is art the object or the obsession, the passing or the passion, the heart or the healing? Readers will also connect on their own level, and follow the story from the artist’s point of view, or from the viewer’s point of view. It is a thought-provoking, insightful book, not only of the love of people, but of the love of art.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).