ABOVE: The Littlest Rockefeller, David, has written a big, $100 million cheque—symbolized here by gold coins—to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Heir to the Rockefeller fortune and keen—or at least shrewd—collector David Rockefeller has announced that he is leaving a Dr. Evil-sized bequest to the Museum of Modern Art when he dies, in the amount of $100 million. But until he shuffles off this mortal coil, as the New York Times reports, the museum will keep on truckin’ with his annual $5 million donations, plus a few Gauguins or Picassos he throws in.

MoMA, of course, is kind of David Rockefeller’s sibling, since the original project was his mother’s initiative. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and some friends scraped together enough money to start the collection—Abby’s husband, John D. Rockefeller Jr., was inexplicably cheap about giving her any money to acquire modern art. That David inherited his taste in art from his mother and not his father, and is now spending the family fortune—he is the last of his generation of Rockefellers—on modern rubbish that dad would have hated strikes us as a wee bit Freudian. But who can argue with all those zeroes?

The article also takes a bit of a tangent on MoMA’s new $20 entry fee. Davey’s in favour of it, but then, he—the 243rd-richest man in the world—can clearly afford it. Also, the MoMA website? Nada. Not even on the press release page. If someone gave us a hundred million clams, we’d, you know, write a press release or something. Geez.

New York Times > MoMA to Receive Its Largest Cash Gift