[MSN] After de Montebello: What awaits the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

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After de Montebello: What awaits the Metropolitan Museum of Art? 
By Rachel Donadio

Monday, January 14, 2008 
Though expected, the news last week that Philippe de Montebello would retire
as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art elicited a range of emotions
among museumgoers: pride and sadness at the end of a stellar era, and
anxiety about the future.

"I was shaky," said Jerry Saltz, the art critic for New York magazine,
striking a common note. "Because just at a time when big museums are getting
things like new wings so spectacularly wrong, the Met has been getting
things close to perfect."

De Montebello is indeed leaving strong, following several recent gallery
renovations and a run of well-attended, scholarly, rigorous and critically
acclaimed exhibitions. What happens next at the Met has relevance for all
major institutions undergoing a generational shift - and all museums in this
young century. Here are some themes certain to arise.

The Art of the Undead

A major concern is how the world's leading encyclopedic museum will approach
contemporary art. In recent years, the Met has organized scattershot
exhibitions by relatively young artists like Neo Rauch and Kara Walker. This
past fall, crowds came - and some critics groaned - when the Met put Damien
Hirst's shark in formaldehyde on view. Is that a sign of things to come?

"The Met's approach to contemporary art has been extremely erratic and
pretty bad, really," said Peter Schjeldahl, the art critic for The New
Yorker. But, he added, "I don't see that that should be a priority for that
place," especially "in a city full of museums that have that mandate."
Still, as the New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman put it last week,
"so many artists have made the Met their lifelong schoolroom," and their
work "would be illuminated next to older art in innumerable ways, not to
mention vice versa."

Showing more contemporary art "would be wonderful for Chelsea," said the
gallery owner Marianne Boesky, since championing work by relatively new
artists would drive up their prices. But is that a good role for the Met?
"I'd think very gingerly about placing the Metropolitan's imprimatur on
objects," said the gallery owner Richard Feigen. "I'd be very, very covetous
of those baptismal certificates."

The Money Dance

Although the Met's endowment is a healthy $2.5 billion, fundraising is a
constant concern. If many younger collectors are focusing on contemporary
art, how will the collecting habits of future board members affect the
museum's mission?

Directors and trustees are forever engaged in "a seduction dance," said
Maxwell Anderson, the director of the Indianapolis Museum. The director's
goal, he said, is "getting people of means who care about the mission of the
museum in the door as supporters, then acquainting them with the majesty of
the offer."

But who will be leading the dance? De Montebello "could walk across Fifth
Avenue into some wealthy guy or gal's apartment and say: 'I need X amount of
money to do something we've never done before. We have no track record on
this.' And they'd say, 'Philippe, if you say so, fine,' " said Jed Perl, the
art critic for The New Republic. At other institutions, Kimmelman wrote,
"collectors and hedge fund managers seem to treat museums as their servants
and publicity agents."

Will the next director have the cultural authority to set the agenda, or
will the trustees have better taste than the director?

The Rightful Owners

In 2006, de Montebello deftly struck a deal with the Italian government to
return 21 objects Italy says were looted, in exchange for the long-term loan
of other antiquities. But the story isn't going away. In the fall, Yale
announced it would return to Peru a group of artifacts excavated from Machu
Picchu in 1912. Every so often, new Holocaust art restitution cases emerge.
In a globalized world, where assertions of cultural nationalism are just as
politicized as they were when museums first built their collections on
expatriated art, restitution claims could be "the biggest trouble" facing
the Met's next director, said Peter Plagens, a former art critic for
Newsweek.

The Space

Forbidden from expanding further into Central Park, under de Montebello, the
Met carved out more exhibition space underground, even under the grand
staircase. Unlike every other museum in the world, the Met hasn't embarked
on a new wing or an annex for its vast holdings. Will that change? Could it?
Should it? Again, directors and boards don't always see eye to eye. "In the
business world, if you don't grow, supposedly you're dying," Perl said. "But
I think that's a very dangerous model to impose on the cultural group."

The Power of the Curator

In recent years, the directors of the Museum of Modern Art, Boston Museum of
Fine Arts and Brooklyn Museum, among others, have been accused of
diminishing the power of their curators. But the Met has remained a bastion
of curatorial authority, where curators, not board members or directors,
take the lead in conceiving exhibitions based on sound scholarship. "I keep
them in line but they keep me in line," de Montebello once said of the Met's
100 plus curators. Will his successor continue that approach?

De Montebello is "the beau ideal of curatorial leadership," said Elizabeth
Easton, the director of the Center for Curatorial Leadership. In a news
conference last week, de Montebello reasserted his priorities. "Art is
first," he said. By contrast, "other institutions have embraced as a primary
part of their mission the museum experience, in opposition to the experience
of coming to look at a work of art."

De Montebello once referred to the Met as "a great ship that you don't turn
around that easily." Maybe so, but things change fast. "If you'd said to
people 15 years ago, 'The Guggenheim will become a kind of rental room for
Eurotrash and that the Modern will become a museum that's unfriendly to
curators,' everyone would have said, 'You're crazy,' " Perl said. Yet both
those things have arguably come to pass. "The problem," he said, "is
institutional history is not an assurance for the future."

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