- Rob Storr: In so far as modernism is anything at all, it's debate about its own definition. And it is a debate which is carried on by works of art to a certain extent by what artists said about their works of art and to a certain extent about what art historians and curators say about it. Many people ask well is modernism over? The answer to that at least as far as I'm concerned is 'no' so long as that debate continues in a lively fashion. And I think what this exhibition ought to do at the sort of the center, if you will, of the New York art world and a large part of the larger art world as well, is to take a collection, one of the richest if not the richest over-all collections and shuffle the deck in such a way that one feels again some of the pressure of those ideas, one against the other; how one generation's collection for the museum does something very different than the next generation's.
- Peter Galassi: We decided quite quickly I think that one of the key aspects of modern art in general, and of this period in particular was that there wasn't just one thing happening in any given time, there were a lot of different things happening, either because artists were in direct competition with each other over the future direction of the tradition that they had inherited, or because they were using different mediums, or because they were simply ignorant of each other because they were in different places so they had different preoccupations. And so the goal then was to try to figure out a structure that would allow us to accommodate this diversity which we felt lay behind the greatness of the art as much as the forward motion of inventiveness.