Why art? Met director provides answer during keynote address

Art Business News, Sept, 2005 by Megan Kamerick

SANTA FE, NM -- Art fans know that art and art museums are important. But, when pressed, they often find it difficult to articulate why.

Even Philippe de Montebello, the director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met), confesses that he, too, struggles in this endeavor. The temptation is to be like children and say art matters "just because," de Montebello said during a July 15 address at Art Santa Fe, a biennial contemporary art fair. "The truth is never to my full satisfaction."

De Montebello, tall and graceful in an impeccable navy, double-breasted suit, took his audience on a 70-minute odyssey exploring the idea of art, using slides from the Met. His elegant voice is familiar to many who have visited the Met and have used the museum's audio guides.

In his keynote address, he brought to bear all his 28 years of experience at one of the nation's premier cultural institutions and distilled it to a core truth: Art and museums provide us with the memory of mankind; and memory is identity.

Even those words do not capture the truth of the matter, said de Montebello. "Words outside of poetry don't have much quality of immediacy. Not a single one of you jumped out of your seat to exclaim 'Eureka!'"

Rather, it was a series of recent dramatic events that prompted such a reaction, he said. One was the destruction of the huge Buddha statues in Bamayian, Afghanistan, as well as the wreckage of exhibits in the Kabul museum, both by the fundamentalist Taliban. The other was the looting of the Baghdad museum after the U.S. invasion.

There was widespread outrage worldwide, de Montebello said, even among those who knew little about the Buddhas or ancient Mesopotamia.

"It is this outcry that represented to me the most eloquent testimony that people do care," he said. "Museums hold things that express the deepest aspirations of a time and place." Yet, he acknowledged, works of art are not easy to decipher.

"We must ask who made them, where, when and why," he said. "The answers are not obvious."

Using paintings and exhibits from the Met, de Montebello led the audience on a virtual lesson in making the most of a museum. "In a museum, we have the luxury to wander at will, but this is also a trap," he said. "It causes us to spend too little time in front of an exhibit."

One of the most inhibiting words used to describe art is "beautiful" because it sets up expectations people feel they must meet in experiencing a work, he observed, adding that there are many different kinds of beauty. Some works are coarse or tough; others are repellant, but more affecting. Therefore, the key to any work is how convincingly an artist conveys his intent, he said.

Most works reveal truths slowly, de Montebello explained. "Only if we make some effort can we appreciate art." This is especially true of exhibits, such as cases of pottery, where on first glance everything looks similar. But taking time will yield wonderful discoveries, he said, showing the shards of stone in one case at the Met with sketches of birds and figures. These functioned as sketch pads for ancient artists. "It's like eavesdropping on antiquity. It's not replicable anywhere else but in a museum."

One of the most important lessons visitors learn in museums is humility, de Montebello opined. "It teaches us that other and totally valid civilizations existed alongside our own."

By example, de Montebello showed a series of slides of different works, from an ivory crosier used by a Catholic archbishop that revealed influences of Islamic art to Chinese embroidery with flowers and a Phoenix that borrows from Indian textiles.

He demonstrated the decorative potential of repeated patterns in the cloth folds on both a 5th-century Buddha from India and a 12th-century Virgin and Child from France. The value of art museums allow visitors to observe and verify such similarities firsthand, he said.

Museums are also testaments to humanity itself, de Montebello continued. They showcase mankind's "awe-inspiring ability to surpass itself. No matter how bleak the times, you cannot wholly despair of the human condition."

Therein lies the value of museums, he said. They are trustees of the qualities that matter. "Excellence, transcendence and genius. The qualities that tip the scales in favor of man."

MEGAN KAMERICK

ABN Contributing Editor