How important is the Museum of Modern Art to America? Robert Hughes: “To put it plainly: Moma, to give it the acronym by which it is always known, made modern art mandatory in America. It did this not only by collecting it, showing it, moving big money into place behind it and evangelising for it, but by setting the prime example whereby, in the US, the function of the museum shifted from accumulation to teaching. This came to apply to almost all museums, not just those dedicated to a hitherto enigmatic or marginal ‘modernism’.”