From the Floor

It's no secret that MoMA has the strongest press office of any museum around. Staffers there aren't afraid to get vocal when they're angry. And when they do get vocal, the target of their wrath had better watch out. If you're a journalist who's gotten on their bad side, your job just might be on the line.

But MoMA's press flacks are incredibly effective in working quietly through back channels as well. We've heard rumors about how they have an amazing ability to find just the right lever to pull with a journalist's editor or publisher to get a story killed before it runs.

Since Wednesday's Wooster Collective exclusive, the art world has been snickering to itself about Banksy's recent New York excursion. Seeing coverage of the story in yesterday's Times made me wonder if MoMA had been at work behind the scenes again to limit its press exposure related to Banksy's work in their galleries.

What makes me wonder this is the fact that in its coverage of the story and the accompanying on-line slide show, the Times ran all the images from Wooster except the two images of the Tesco soup can at MoMA (one of which is at right). Run the whole lot of photos available except for two? And those two just happen to both be from MoMA? You have to wonder.

Related:

• Transcript of Banksy's e-mail interview with the Times: "It's harder to paint subway trains in New York these days than it is to paint your major public exhibition spaces."
• Reuters coverage of the story: "I tend to gravitate to places with less sophisticated security systems."