Making the Mummies Dance. - book reviews

National Review, March 1, 1993 by James Gardner

Making the Mummies Dance, by Thomas Hoving (Simon & Schuster, 429 pp., $25)

IF THIS were a better book, it would probably be far less enjoyable than it surely is. Thomas Hoving's account of the trials and tribulations of his 13 years as the head of New York's Metropolitan Museum is, some would contend, like his other books and indeed like his entire career, a vulgar crowdpleaser. Here we have the man who virtually invented the blockbuster exhibition, most fatuously with The Treasures of Tutankhamen, and whose most lasting contribution to the institution he served with such questionable distinction may have been the installation of two big gift-shops in its augustly granitic lobby. His book is enlivened by no lofty meditations on human culture. It is about the sleazy, sub-reptilian world of the administration of America's greatest art museum. Everything is rampant opportunism, careerism out of control, snobbery of the most acrobatic sort. The charm of this compulsively readable book is that its author is fully aware of the tawdriness of the world by which he continues to be so fatally captivated. There is an almost lubricious thrill in his retelling of how he scrambled for media attention as Mayor Lindsay's parks commissioner, how he managed to ooze his way into the museum's directorship, how he and Jackie O. were lionized at the Plaza-Athenee in Paris. It has recently been reported in the New York Times that the book is rife with inaccuracies. But even if the book were accurate, would that make much difference? The Times once ran an interview in which Hoving admitted that he was no longer much interested in art. For evidence that he was ever interested in the first place, one will have to look elsewhere than in this book.