A New Spin on the MoMA Satellite

"I'm not someone who does Facebook," Peter Eleey told The Observer. "And something about it has always kind of bothered me."

Mr. Eleey, who recently became the chief curator at MoMA P.S.1, was talking about his first show there, "The Talent Show," which opened Sunday and arose in part out of the curator's dislike—and suspicion—of the popular social network.

"I'd also been thinking about other things unrelated to art: For more than five years we've known that our government spies on us and we accept it."

With close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, a square jaw and piercing eyes, the curator looks like a Hollywood version of his own job, down to the black-frame glasses. His intensity is appropriate to a position that will bring him a tremendous amount of scrutiny, from New York's art world and beyond it.

P.S.1 occupies a unique role in the city: center of experimentation, influencer of trends, namer of the next hot names. A year-round Whitney Biennial with the imprimatur of MoMA, some of the art world's bigger young stars—Dana Schutz, Jules de Balincourt, Matthew Day Jackson—have come out of P.S.1 shows. Collectors have used its catalogs as shopping lists, often to good effect. With its music events and Sunday parties, it has single-handedly lowered the average age of museum attendance in New York.

But a recent conversation with Mr. Eleey indicates the powerful institution may be branching off into new directions. Changes in store: Shows that deal not with who's hot but with broader social themes—artists can be "canaries in the coal mine," of society he said—and shows that mix older artists with younger ones. As Mr. Eleey put it, P.S.1 is "an institution of discovery and of rediscovery."

Before joining P.S.1, Mr. Eleey was probably best known for his years (2002-2007) as director and producer of the New York public art pioneer Creative Time. There, his projects included setting off fireworks in Central Park (Lightcycle, by Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang) and the much-loved annual Soho Art Parade. After that, he did a two-year stint at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which, with a few relatively recent transfers, has become something of a farm team for the Museum of Modern Art.

Now, Mr. Eleey is in an unusual, perhaps unenviable, position: He uses the title "curator," although his predecessor, Klaus Biesenbach, was "chief curator"; Mr. Biesenbach remains director of P.S.1, though he's now chief curator of MoMA.

Does the hierarchy sound complicated? "We got to know each other, and we got along really well," said Mr. Eleey.  In 2007, the two co-curated artist Doug Aitken's "Sleepwalkers," five short films featuring actors like Donald Sutherland and Tilda Swinton. A truly public art project, the films were projected daily at dusk onto seven of the MoMa's exterior walls. Admission, by definition, was free. "He's great, extraordinary" said Mr. Eleey of his boss. (As for MoMA's director, Glenn Lowry, he added, "We haven't done much together.")

P.S.1 was founded in 1971 by Alanna Heiss as the Institute for Art and Urban Resources, an group devoted to hosting art exhibitions in empty spaces across New York; in 1997, it reopened after a renovation of its home in Queens, a huge former grammar school where classrooms now make for galleries. In 2000, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center became MoMA P.S.1, an affiliate of the Museum of Modern Art—but not quite. The merger was actually phased in over seven years, and only fairly recently did MoMA take control of the center's finances and board.

But what happens to P.S.1 when MoMA becomes more cutting-edge and populist, essentially, when MoMA becomes more like P.S.1 (which, arguably, is happening with shows like Marina Abramović and Tim Burton). "There is more overlap" than there used to be, he said, "and we are all part of the same institution." But "there is a degree of experimentation and speed" to P.S.1.

"The Talent Show," along those lines, attempts to be about the present moment in culture in that it aims to examine the relationships that have emerged between artists, audiences and participants because of competing desires for notoriety and privacy. Mr. Eleey said of the show, which first opened at the Walker Art Center, that it's "about the dramatically shifting boundaries between what constitutes the private space and the public space."

Going forward, "I'm planning a large group show for next fall that will be ... topical," the curator hinted. And while Mr. Eleey said the issues he's concerned with aren't market-oriented, he may be involved in recommending some art acquisitions for MoMA, he said.

So star-spotters should still be paying attention.