FUTURE SHOCK AT THE MET?

Whatever the Metropolitan Museum’s next steps after Thomas P. Campbell’s resignation, it must not become so enmeshed with the art-fair set that it loses sight of the long view.

PHOTOGRAPH BY AGE FOTOSTOCK / ALAMY

Late Tuesday afternoon, as members of the Art Dealers Association of America (A.D.A.A.) were gearing up for the gala opening of their annual art fair, at the Park Avenue Armory, the Met dropped a bombshell: its director and C.E.O., Thomas P. Campbell, is resigning, after eight years on the job. It’s not breaking news that the museum has been foundering under Campbell’s leadership, dogged by reports of deficits, layoffs, and scrapped plans for a six-hundred-million-dollar renovation of the wing for modern and contemporary art—this after it had already leased and inaugurated the Whitney’s former Marcel Breuer Building, on Madison Avenue, to plant a flag for “art of the now” during remodelling. (For an encyclopedic museum like the Met, whose oldest holdings date to the Stone Age, “now” starts with Cubism, bolstered by a billion-dollar gift of paintings by Picasso, et al., from Leonard Lauder, in 2013.) Last month, the Times ran a front-page exposé with a click-baiting headline that cited a quote from a retired curator happy to disparage Campbell on record: “Is the Met Museum ‘A Great Institution in Decline’?” The sour cherry on top of all the bad news was the unveiling of a new, universally panned logo, uniting the Beaux-Arts Met proper, the brutalist Met Breuer, and the medieval Cloisters into one squat, red, six-letter fiasco; never has the word “the” received such bad press.

Nonetheless, the timing of Tuesday’s announcement felt pointed, landing, as it did, during the kickoff to a week in which no less than a dozen art fairs open in New York City, trailing the power players of the international art world in their wake. (It’s known to insiders as “Armory Week,” not for the A.D.A.A.’s event at the actual Armory but for another fair, held at the western edge of Manhattan, on Piers 92 and 94, and named after the 1913 Armory Show, which famously scandalized viewers with Marcel Duchamp’s painting “Nude Descending a Staircase.”) A Who’s Who of museum honchos worked the aisles of Tuesday night’s Park Avenue opening, including the Guggenheim’s understated Richard Armstrong, the Studio Museum in Harlem’s incandescent Thelma Golden, and moma’s polished Glenn Lowry, who was short-listed by oddsmakers for Campbell’s job when the Met’s former director, the patrician Philippe de Montebello, retired, in 2008. Also spied in the crowd was Daniel Brodsky, the chairman of the Met’s board of trustees, who is said to have been instrumental in showing Campbell the door. (Kudos to the Times’s Robin Pogrebin, whose tenacious reporting in recent months may have been the straw that broke Brodsky’s back.)

Then again, maybe the timing of the announcement of Campbell’s resignation is fitting. This isn’t news about art, after all; it’s news about money and back-channel politics, and about a storied institution having turned a blind eye to the art of its time for too long, which ensnared that institution in its own game of catch-up. The mild-mannered Campbell was an unorthodox choice when he was appointed in 2009, plucked from the curatorial ranks as a tapestry scholar best known for organizing two blockbuster shows on Renaissance and Baroque textiles, now tasked with steering a bureaucratic behemoth into the twenty-first century. If Campbell is not precisely a scapegoat, it’s hard to fault him single-handedly for the museum’s mismanagement. And his tenure was hardly without its art-of-now triumphs. The Met Breuer’s recent Kerry James Marshall show left critics besotted, and crowds lined up around the block. If Campbell ruffled some American feathers when he poached the British curator Sheena Wagstaff, from the Tate, to be the Met’s first ever curator of the Modern and Contemporary Art Department, his decision panned out. Not only has the Met Breuer’s attendance outstripped projections, Wagstaff has overseen monographic exhibitions of female artists—the Indian Minimalist Nasreen Mohamedi, the Italian alchemist Marisa Merz, the Brazilian modernist Lygia Pape—who have been hidden figures in the annals of modern and contemporary art for too long.

The Met may need to get its financial house in order, but it is America’s richest museum in the most crucial sense: the objects in its collection. Even as the search for a new director is under way, the Met has an unrivalled opportunity to connect our fraught present moment to the lessons of history. One of Campbell’s last-gasp gestures before stepping down was an Op-Ed in the Times (ironic, yes), in which he made a passionate case for the N.E.A., without whose support the museum’s upcoming show on China’s Han Dynasty might not have been possible. Imagine an audio-tour treasure hunt guiding visitors to pieces on view from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. Or, given the museum’s push, under Campbell’s tenure, into digital territory, how about an event inviting Instagrammers to hashtag objects in the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas galleries (located on the ground floor in the Met, conveniently close to the modern collection), created by great American artists before any border separated Mexico and the United States? Whatever the next steps for the museum, it must not become so enmeshed with the art-fair set that it loses sight of the long view.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/future-shock-at-the-met