So says its director, Glenn Lowry, who will be in Canberra this week to speak about the famed institution at the National Gallery of Australia's annual lecture.

Entitled Rethinking MoMA in the 21^st Century, the talk will cover the recent architectural, intellectual and program changes now taking place there.

Mr Lowry, who has been at MoMA's helm for almost 20 years, said while the museum would never have the challenge of attracting visitors, its mandate still involved engaging the art-going public on several levels.

"We're lucky enough to be in a very big city with a lot of residents and a lot of tourists, but the challenges remain similar," he said of the privately funded institution in the heart of Manhattan.

"I think there are obviously differences in funding, and of course that has an impact on how one relates to trustees and government. But the issues of engaging visitors, creating a vibrant intellectual atmosphere within the museum, embracing both immediate and distant communities – those I think are common for most museums."

He said the legendary philanthropy that allowed many American institutions to thrive was not nearly as beneficial as it seemed.

"You have to remember, we have a culture of individual support for the arts, but what we lack is a culture of federal support for the arts, and I think there's always a tendency to see the grass as being greener on the other side," he said.

"So all of my colleagues who are from Australia and even Europe, who love the idea of the American system, forget that with that system, there's an enormous amount of uncertainty. There's no guarantee on Monday that you're going to have the support you had the day before."

And he maintained that, contrary to popular belief, sharing the neighbourhood with another art behemoth, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was a help rather than a hindrance.

"The Met's responsibility is to put their modern art in the continuum of 5000 years of art history, and ours is to look at it in the opposite way, it's to always be looking at it in the present in its relationship to the future, as opposed to the past," he said.

"So that gives the public an incredible opportunity often to see the same artist in a very different context."

For example, MoMA is currently showing Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, exploring Matisse's practice of collage in the late 1940s.

"I think our most important contribution is our commitment to living artists, and to their work and to their ideas, and our goal is always to see the immediate past, the prior generation or two or three generations of artists, through the lens of the present."

"So our goal is not to see Matisse in the context of the late 19^th and early 20^th century, our goal is to look at him through the eyes of the late 20^th and early 21^st century, and see what's still fresh there."

Glenn Lowry will be speaking at the National Gallery of Australia on Wednesday October 29, 6.00pm in Gandel Hall. Bookings and more information at nga.gov.au.