Philippe at Abu NYU: Will He Still Blast Rent-a-Louvre?

I've become an expert on museum issues, on museum problems, on the history of museums, on the nature and purpose of museums. I expect what I'll be doing will be more museological than art historical. It would be closer to what I would call high art appreciation than art history.

---Philippe de Montebello at his January press conference, announcing his imminent departure from the Metropolitan Museum.

I had been really looking forward to marveling at Philippe Unchained.

He had indicated that he would feel less constrained about speaking out more forcefully on major museological issues once he left his Metropolitan Museum directorship and I was looking forward to the end of his self-censorship.

So I was delighted to read, at the beginning of Carol Vogel's article in today's NY Times about Philippe's next chapter---that he would be teaching "the history and culture of museums" at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts...a fine platform for his new bully pulpit.

But then I read the Abu Dhabi part and the consultancy part. Suddenly academic freedom didn't seem so free. As a consultant to "museums abroad that he declined to name," and as another ornament in Abu Dhabi's cultural crown, he'll have the perfect excuse to give free reign to his old habits of reticence and discretion.

We don't exactly know from the Times or from NYU's press release whether Philippe will advise on the megamillion Abu Dhabi museum project. But he'll be teaching there and, according to NYU's press release, he will be "structuring museum placement opportunities for students and graduates." Presumably this will mean a close working relationship with the nascent museums on Saadiyat Island.

Mariët Westermann, director of the IFA and vice chancellor for Abu NYU, alluded to the synergy between the new university outpost and the new cultural district, in her comments to Vogel:

Ms. Westermann said the visual arts curriculum at Abu Dhabi would be "very important," especially because of the ambitious program to build museums in the emirate. Both the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Louvre plan to open satellite institutions in a new cultural district there over the next few years.

In the university's press release, Philippe said:

My courses and seminars will be about ideas, not museum management or practice, but through them I hope to inspire new generations of gifted graduate students in art history to look favorably on opportunities in the museum world of the future."

...which probably means not casting aspersions on places like the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which he once candidly decried in Le Monde.