In Choosing Glenn Lowry’s Successor, MoMA Played it Safe

Photo: Peter Ross

Do you know anything?” the performance artist Marina Abramović asked over the phone in late March. For months, it had been the question on everyone’s mind: Who was going to lead MoMA now? Abramović had recently had lunch with the museum’s current director, Glenn Lowry, who would be stepping down this fall. She asked him explicitly. “I could get nothing out of him,” she said.

Since Lowry had announced his retirement this past September, the subject of his successor had become...