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The Museum of Modern Art is deeply divided. It wants to run wild and kick up its heels, but it can't imagine a world without fences. It wants to open up to new work, young art and different ways of being a museum, but it often ends up doing things halfway, hedging its bets. That way lies mediocrity of a most tortured sort. ''Compass in Hand: Selections From the Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection'' conveys this ambivalence in all its amazing messiness. The show might almost be parenthetically titled ''museum on a couch,'' so clearly does the Modern seem to flop down, stare at the ceiling and mull things over, in a stream-of-consciousness mode. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Museum of Modern Art is not getting into the concert promotion business just yet, but its latest commission has, at least on paper, the components and the pedigree of a pop-music spectacle. On Tuesday the museum said that it had commissioned Antony Hegarty, the artist and lead singer of the band Antony and the Johnsons, to create and perform a new work called ''Swanlights'' that will be presented at Radio City Music Hall on Jan. 26. The performance event, which MoMA described in a news release as a ''meditation on light, nature, and femininity,'' will include songs from all four albums by Antony and the Johnsons (including their most recent release, also called ''Swanlights'') with symphonic arrangements by Nico Muhly, Rob Moose, and Maxim Moston and performed by a 60-piece orchestra. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For a generation that came of age in the late 1960s and early '70s, three unusual reference books were catalytic consciousness raisers. ''The Joy of Sex'' and ''Our Bodies, Ourselves'' are still in print; the third and possibly most influential of all is less familiar to people born after 1980: the Whole Earth Catalog. Brainchild of the visionary techno-hippie artist Steward Brand, this compendium of resources for the New Age is the subject of ''Access to Tools: Publications From the Whole Earth Catalog, 1968-1974,'' a modest but stirring time capsule of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The Whole Earth Catalog did for counterculture youth in the '60s what the Sears Catalog did for children of the Great Depression and what Google does for people of the Internet age: provide a way for ordinary people to connect with and make use of the global economy. Against the dominion of capitalist profiteers and the top-down cult of technocratic expertise, it aimed to put practical, intellectual and spiritual means of self-determination into the hands of the people. A telephone-book size tome printed on cheap paper in black and white and in all kinds of typographies, and peppered with sharp, often funny commentary on its products by its editors -- as well as essays, short stories by writers like Wendell Berry and letters from readers -- the catalog was nothing if not user friendly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In hundreds of exhibitions over the last three decades the names of a stunning number of curators and artists have entered the institutional memory of the Museum of Modern Art. But behind nearly all of these shows there has been a constant, a man whose name rarely surfaces anywhere except in invoices. It seems somehow appropriate, then, to find Jerome Neuner, the director of the museum's department of exhibition design and production, in a windowless office below street level, down an anonymous industrial hallway. The tables around him are covered by yards of scroll-like paper that look like something a medieval copyist might pore over. But these are computer-printed scrolls, precise, color-coded schedules that keep Mr. Neuner apprised of every important date involving the shows now happening or about to happen throughout the 125,000 square feet of gallery space above his head, 40,000 more square feet than he had to worry about before the museum's expansion was completed in 2004. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A hint of schadenfreude might have been in the air when gossip-mongers delightedly spread the news that the Museum of Modern Art trustee Kathy Fuld and her husband, Richard S. Fuld Jr., the former chief executive of Lehman Brothers, would be selling 16 postwar works on paper at Christie's on Nov. 12. Still, their offerings could well be among the biggest draws of the sale, potentially attracting old-time collectors who bowed out of the market when it became overheated. Far lower in price than paintings by these modern masters, they are seminal images of the highest quality that only occasionally come to market. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]