Why the new Whitney is about art - not Artworld

There's art, and then there's Artworld. Artworld is buzz, style, money, blockbuster openings, gallerista-fashionistas eyeing each other; theory-clotted higher drivel struggling to attach critical ballast to the lightweight and the forgettable, auction porn, vanity architecture, the carnival of the meretricious; the twinned inflation of hokey-jokey ephemeral sculpture and prices; art appreciation as a term of investment rather than understanding, anxiously acquisitive billionaires from the far east, near east and Slavic east all trying to outscore their rivals, padding around galleries as the fancy eyeware ushers them to the Next Sure Thing. The Meatpacking District of New York is the epicentre of Artworld Manhattan. When the new Whitney Museum opened its doors in the neighbourhood on May 1, the question was always whether it would be sucked into its black hole of glamour.

The old Whitney was the puritan on Madison Ave. Penetrating the gloom of Marcel Breuer's stacked concrete boxes was generally an act of faith. Even the basement cafe tried its best to block out the fun along with the light. Come the biennial, the puritan would put on a fancy frock, adopt a whoop of a meaninglessly provoking title, and hoochy-coochy around a bit. The old Whitney's farewell show, as if to demonstrate it had had enough of modernist gravitas, was the falsetto giggle of a Jeff Koons retrospective. But there was something about the fight that the art had to put up against the enveloping murk of the building which sorted out the weak from the strong and commanded the respect that comes from prolonged concentration. Would Renzo Piano's new Whitney, with its airy openings to the river and to the thrum and thrust of the city, make it too easy; turning high-minded machines of abstract expressionism into metrosexual playground ornaments?

A number of critics have complained that this is exactly what has happened. Those outdoor terraces are just a mini-High Line; the plump couches hotel-lobby fodder; the glittering bars an invitation to a hookup. Just wait, they warn, for the Twomblytinis and the Rothkoritas. So why was I, who can curmudgeon with the best, wandering around it with an expression of stupid bliss on my face, not quite able to believe how hospitable to the art, not the Artworld, the new Whitney actually is? An opening show of 600 of the museum's holding of 22,000 works gets its title from a Robert Frost poem of uncharacteristically whimsical couplets about Columbus's predicament: "America is Hard to See". That itself speaks of a gutsy confidence on the part of Donna de Salvo, the chief curator, that with new room and new thought, this might no longer be the case. I did see, literally in a new light, work I've never much rated before: a Georgia O'Keeffe abstraction; a captionless Lichtenstein; and - ye gods - an Eva Hesse dangler of resinated cords which positively dances its broody sorrows. There are knockout masterpieces that somehow have eluded me; above all, a moving Jacob Lawrence series of small war paintings, made when he came back from the battle in 1946. There are more familiar numbers which expand before your eyes: Hopper's "Early Sunday Morning", storefront parallel to the picture plane, caught in its bell jar of frozen time.

The exhilaration is in part due to the light, which, on the fifth floor, pours down from filtered skylights; and with the tripling of space. But, on reflection, the very features lamented by the party-poopers as low diversions - those openings to the city - turn out to be the secret of its newfound elan. They set up a dialogue between the world and the art, so much of which, even when it is abstract, feeds off the impatient percussion of American life: the roaring start of Whitman's "Song of Myself" or the opening sentence of Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. If we were looking at, say, Fra Angelico, this would be all wrong. But we are not. We are looking at a "Jack the Dripper" Pollock; at Alex Katz's blaze of "The Red Smile"; at George Bellows' merciless punching.

The most magical museums all have this same unforced affinity between urban place and art space. In the Rockox House in Antwerp, you see Van Dyck and Rubens as its owner did; in the mottled-mirror bling of the Doria-Pamphilj gallery in Rome, you sample the baroque confectionery of Correggio and Carracci. Amid the jet-fuelled Artworld, the shopping mall of the mega-rich - here a Warhol, there a Warhol, everywhere a Warhol - perhaps it is not so very bad to have a place in Manhattan where the art can jump for joy because it finds itself at home.

Simon Schama is an FT contributing editor

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