And, in one of the most promising features of the reopened museum, the mechanics for development are there. Post-expansion plans call for regular rotation and refreshment of the collection. Every six months, a third of the galleries on floors five, four and two will be reinstalled. By the end of 18 months, everything, the promise is, will, have been rethought. Destination favorites — “Starry Night,” “Desmoiselles” — will no doubt stay on view, but what’s around them will change, which will change them too.

Such flexibility offers tremendous potential for new thinking, particularly at a museum whose curatorial staff has, in the past few years, begun to diversify (though not its board of trustees). Flexibility also, it’s worth saying, allows the option of backpedaling should the opening “new” model prove to be little too new for a healthy box-office.

My guess is that in some hopefully ever-improving version, this 21st century MoMA will work, if only for self-preservative reasons. Multicultural is now marketable. To ignore it is to forfeit profit, not to mention critical credibility. And the new MoMA is obviously tailored to a new and younger audience, one that has no investment, nostalgic or otherwise, in the old pre-Taniguchi model, which now lives on mostly in the memories of a fading population (which itself had no direct experience of the original, progressive 1930s museum).

On the evidence of what I see in the reopened museum, a bunch of very smart curators are putting their heads together to work from inside to begin to turn a big white ship in another direction. We’re not talking Revolution. With this museum we probably never will. But in the reboot there are stimulating ideas and unexpected, history-altering talents around every corner. As long as both keep showing up at MoMA, so will I.

Museum of Modern Art

The museum reopens to the public Oct. 21 (member previews begin Oct. 12); moma.org.