If you have not yet made it out to MoMA Queens, this is your last chance. Really. The Long Island City facility, which opened in June 2002, is down to its final days as an exhibition space. On September 27, it will close its doors to the public and become a storage, conservation, and research facility for the museum.

Until then, museum admission has been reduced from $12 to $8. But buyers beware. I went to the museum on Monday. And Picasso, Mondrian, Matisse, Cezanne, and Van Gogh have moved on. There is an empty and anxious, after-the-ball atmosphere to the building, which already appears to have shed its gown and returned to its warehouse incarnation.

Certainly, if you visit the museum this week, you will want to take in the “Lee Bontecou” and “Tall Buildings” exhibitions, as well as the small show “Humble Masterpieces,” curated by Paola Antonelli, which is made up of small useful things such as “Chopsticks” (c. 3000 B.C.), “Safety Pin” (1849), “Q-tips” (1923), “Clothes Hanger” (1935), “Slinky” (1945), and “Post-it Note” (c. 1977).

On your way to “Humble Masterpieces,” you will move through some of the galleries that housed “To Be Looked At,” the rotating exhibition of selections from MoMA’s permanent collection. But MoMA’s paintings and sculp tures are not on view. The galleries, though fully lit – as if the house lights have already come up, and the guards become-ushers are there to urge you out the door – are blank, echoey, and bleak; filled, instead, with packing crates from the Bontecou retrospective.

“Bontecou Crates” (my title), not a real show, is on view just the same. An unofficial reality-museum show, “Bontecou Crates” allows viewers to watch from the wings, to see the magician perform his tricks from backstage. Artists for decades have been making art about process. MoMA, both intentionally and unintentionally, seems to have answered in kind. The stacked crates and vacant pedestals, as well as the nail holes, empty frames, and pencil marks on the gallery walls, demystify the art and the museum.

MoMA seems to believe that the public have a right to know what goes into putting up, and tearing down, a museum exhibition; to get the show behind the show; to see the crates behind the art. In response to this need, and to compliment, or bookend, “Bontecou Crates,” MoMA QNS is showing (and this is absolutely true) a behind-the-scenes film, “Installing Lee Bontecou.” This film documents the installation of the Bontecou Retrospective at its first venue, the UCLA Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles. The film, according to MoMA, “shows curators, art handlers, registrars, designers, and others at work in the galleries before the doors open to the public.” Curators talk on the phone about vit rines vs. no vitrines; discuss how many guards they should have; and tell art handlers in the galleries to move artworks “Just a smidge. Just a tad.”

“Installing Lee Bontecou” and “Bontecou Crates” are fitting ends for MoMA QNS, an entity that began its existence with the museum’s celebration of its move from Manhattan with the performance and documentary video “Projects 76: Francis Alys.” This was a kind of mock saint’s-day procession. The artist, Francis Alys, accompanied by a brass band and impromptu marchers, paraded MoMA’s “modern icons,” our “articles of devotion” – representations of Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon” and Duchamp’s “Bicycle Wheel,” among other works – along a rose petalstrewn path from 11 West 53rd Street across the East River to 33rd Street at Queens Boulevard.

Francis Alys’s performance was meant to inspire in us an “explor[ation of] our relationship to the material world in all its potential richness … to encourage us to ponder the significance of modern art in our spiritual lives, and to reconsider these monuments [the Picasso and the Duchamp].” The only problem with “Projects 76,” was that the actual artworks, the objects with which we have a personal relationship, were not present. They were there in effigy. March an actual Cimabue or a Picasso down the streets of New York, and, I imagine, you would get a much different response than you would with reproductions. As far as the Duchamp “Bicycle Wheel” is concerned: Who would know, besides MoMA’s curators and insurers, the difference between the copy and the original?

Standing on the pockmarked floors in the Bontecou show – in which the noise from the video in the “Tall Buildings” exhibition spilled intrusively over the false walls – or while watching Bill Viola’s DVD projection “Hatsu Yume (First Dream)” (1981) – in a ramp gallery space not dark or secluded enough to see or hear the film without distraction – I did not feel sad at MoMA QNS’s passing. I felt a sense of relief.

Right before I went out to MoMA QNS, I had lunch with a couple of artists, both of whom are avid museumgoers. One confessed to me, rather sheepishly, that he had never made it to the Queens venue. “I always planned to go,” he told me. “But I kept hearing such terrible things about it that I didn’t want to spoil my memory of the paintings … and I know I missed seeing some great things in ‘Matisse/Picasso.'” Before I knew it, I was assuring him that he had not missed anything at all; that seeing great works badly installed or in dubious contexts can be worse than not seeing them at all.

I will not miss the zigzagging, off ramp-meets-off-ramp feel of MoMA QNS’s entrance. I will not miss the collision of multiple video screens, food court, and bookstore. Nor will I miss the absence of natural light or the museum’s commitment to contemporary art at the expense and paralysis of its permanent collection. Certainly, I will not miss ill-conceived shows like “Matisse/Picasso.” Maybe, we can chalk it all up to Michael Maltzan’s design, to bad Feng Schui. Whatever the causes – good riddance.