MoMA, while a fine institution, does not reward it's patrons with these very basic levels of enjoyment. You are a hurried art enthusiast, scuttled about, trying to get the most of your lofty admission fee. You are bumped into as novices gawk and point.

Peggy Guggenheim donated the Mural to the University of Iowa in 1951 because she recognized Iowa City's unique metropolitan qualities. The art school was considered "The Greenwich Village of the West". Iowa City is still a global city that influences art and language.

Simply, that some only saw Mural in MoMA is more telling about those viewers, than it is about the worthiness of Iowa City, and the University of Iowa Art Museum. As an art enthusiast I seek out art in some of the smallest of venues you can imagine, an old church, a middle school, a collectors library. The intimacy allowed in these space is priceless.

I would like to leave you with a poem that I wrote while sitting in front of Mural as a student in creative writing. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the quiet moment in writing in creating it.

On Jackson Pollock's Mural (1943)

Rolling strokes of blue and black with
Splattered streaks
Of red,
Like a Motel 6 bathroom
Fresh with blood

Imagined faces and testis
Coalesce from dream clouds
Of paint, where screaming
Ghosts reach up over an
Android skull – brain exposed

A falcon beak drips fresh of yellow,
The yoke
Of yesterday's broken shell.
White bone, cracked by black
And paradise blue drips

Colored firestorm, a vomit of Egg
salad, where
Images are imagined,
But violent confusion is
Chaotically clear, like a universe
Ready to conform

To your points:

1) I'm inherently mistrustful of slippery-slope arguments, especially when there's no empirical evidence to back them up. I'm not talking about legitimizing asset-stripping, I'm talking about bringing Mural to a home worthy of it. They're two different things, and I do believe with some reason that this particular painting is sui generis.

2) I never mentioned major cities. I frankly don't care much what city Mural is in, although there's a strong case to be made for it to remain in America. Bilbao is actually a fantastic example of a museum which is very much on the art world's radar, even if it's not a major city. I might add the Villa Panza in Vicenze, the Chinati Foundation, and many others. What I care about is great art being where it belongs, which is not necessarily in a major city, but is necessarily in a major collection, or at least regularly exhibited in major collections. And the University of Iowa is never going to be a major collection.

3) Am I really overstating Mural's significance? You say that it's "a transitional painting, not a culmination" -- but isn't that precisely what makes it so important? Couldn't the same be said of the Desmoiselles? I'd be interested to hear which paintings you think rank above it on the list, given that art-historical importance is at least as relevant to such rankings as intrinsic aesthetics.

I, too, have seen the work only at the MoMA retrospective ten years ago. It was stunning. Do you really think that if it had been at MoMA the whole time, we wouldn't think more highly of it?