Making the Dummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. - book reviews

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 8, 1993 | by Eric Gibson

Autobiography Traces Change in Museums

Among those individuals one would think of as potential autobiographers, museum directors surely are far down the list. It is a position that, in the minds of many, combines the dreariest aspects of the academic and bureaucratic lives (albeit leavened now and then by contact with high society), and would hardly seem to furnish material worthy of public reminiscence.

It is one measure of how our museums and our cultural life in general have changed, however, that we should now have such a memoir, Thomas Hoving's Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Simon & Schuster). The book traces Hoving's term as director of the New York museum between 1967 and 1977, a decade in which he greatly expanded its institutional scope and audience, while at the same time embroiling it in more scandals than one museum -- not to mention museum official -- had ever been through.

Hoving became director of the museum from his position as New York City commissioner of Parks and Recreation under then-Mayor John V. Lindsay. He was no career bureaucrat, however, but a fully qualified art historian who had been a curator at the Met's Cloisters -- its uptown museum of medieval art -- before being given the parks job as a reward for his support of Lindsay during the 1965 election.

Hoving arrived at the museum determined to shake things up, to transform what he viewed as a shabby and stodgy institution into the foremost museum of its kind in the world and one, moreover, that would attract visitors from every segment of society.

This much was laudable; it was Hoving's methods that were questionable. He became so carried away with his power and the publicity he admits he craved unduly that he lost all sense of proportion. The result was a buccaneering style that alienated as many as it persuaded.

Thus, although stellar acquisitions were made under his tenure, Hoving's judgment often failed him. He allowed an Egyptian temple to come into the museum, aware of its marginal art-historical interest all along; approved the purchase of an ancient Greek vase that had been smuggled out of Italy; and allowed a prominent collector to exact as the price of donating his collection the construction of a separate wing with replicas of the rooms at his home in which the paintings originally had hung.

On the exhibitions front, Hoving's copy book was severely blotted by the notorious "Harlem on My Mind," which ostensibly sought to document that neighborhood's contribution to 20th century American culture but which, in the end, turned into a racial polemic, making the museum a lightning rod for criticism from both liberals and conservatives, not to mention the city's art critics.

Although he was nearly fired more than once, Hoving managed to hold on despite the turmoil, albeit finding it harder and harder to bring off his celebrated "coups" -- which brought prestigious donors, spectacular exhibitions and landmark acquisitions into the museum -- because trustees, staff members and others gradually tired of his high-handed style.

He finally left the museum in 1977 when public and city opposition doomed his last grandiose project, a planned center for making art films that was to have been funded by Walter H. Annenberg, a former ambassador to Great Britain and Northern Ireland. After a search, Philippe de Montebello, Hoving's deputy, was appointed director, a position he has held ever since. Hoving himself went on to a career as a novelist, art consultant and, until recently, editor of the now-defunct Connoisseur magazine.

Just as Hoving's tenure as director departed from the norm, so do his memoirs. The book is anything but the kind of dry accounting of acquisitions, exhibitions and publications and thumbnail sketches of important participants one might expect.

The literary model Hoving's book calls to mind is Story of My Life, the autobiography of the 18th century libertine Giovanni Giacomo Cassanova. Throughout, the tone is confessional rather than reflective. But "confessional" here should. not be confused with "regretful." Far from it. Hoving recounts his exploits with the unrepentant, wink-at-the-audience pride of an inveterate seducer. In a typical remark, he writes that he wondered if a candidate for a senior curatorial job would be able to work "under [him], a person notorious for hands-on management and outright meddling."

His book is also spiteful in a way one expects only from the memoirs of politicians and celebrities. Upon those who agreed with him and supported him, Hoving bestows plaudits. Everyone else is a dunderhead or worse, and as a result a great deal of space is devoted to settling scores.

Nonetheless, in its own perverse way, this is an important book for two reasons. Hoving's career ushered in the "modern" museum, which, along with much that was good, brought with it a confusion of substance with spectacle and art with entertainment, as well as a preoccupation with short-term ends in place of any longer view. His book provides the most detailed chronicle yet of this fateful transformation of our museums. Along the way it provides a sobering glimpse of just what a museum director is prepared to do to secure a treasured acquisition. To say that Hoving's guiding philosophy was that the ends justified the means is to understate matters.