January 2009

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Among the few detractors of the Met’s current style of collecting is Thomas Hoving, who kindly agreed to be interviewed for this article. 77 years young – he does most of his reading on a Kindle e-book reader and attends rallies for Barack Obama – Hoving remains an astonishing conversationalist. His vocabulary is colourful, and he takes evident delight in being provocative. Noting that he had already ‘filled in the last gaps in the [expletive] encyclopaedia’ during his own tenure, he suggests that the Met might be better served by pooling its resources each year and going after just a few objects with genuine star power. He thinks that the Met’s current approach is ‘excessively dull and so-called scholarly’, concluding, ‘that’s what you do when you don’t have any [expletive] idea what the [expletive] else to do’.

Although Hoving’s verdict is very difficult to agree with, his basic philosophy regarding acquisitions is plausible. There are museums that collect sparsely and hold out for the rare landmark object. Indeed, the Met itself operated rather more along those lines during Hoving’s reign, purchasing such items as Velázquez’s masterful Juan de Pareja and the (dubiously exported and therefore later returned) Greek red-figure Euphronios Krater at very great expense while eschewing, to some extent, growth in new or neglected areas of study. Were the Met’s new director to revert to such a winner-take-all strategy, one suspects that the curators, who have become accustomed to finding a receptive ear for their scrupulously researched acquisition proposals in the director’s office, would be disappointed if Dr Yes suddenly turns into Dr No.

Given that director-designate Thomas Campbell has been chosen from the Met’s own ranks, such a radical change seems unlikely. As Walter Liedtke, the Met’s Dutch paintings specialist, told me, ‘Tom is clearly a vote for continuity with Philippe: he is very much concerned with scholarship, serious collecting, conservation, education and other concerns that have been traditional at the Met.’