Hoving's Ravings: Been to the Met Lately?

Thomas Hoving

Tom Hoving has a journalistic conflict-of-interest problem. As a newly minted columnist for Artnet Magazine, he's got a not-so-hidden personal agenda---to rehabilitate his reputation as an authority who knows what's best for museums in general and for the Metropolitan Museum in particular. Marginalized long ago by the institution he used to run, he seems to be trying to get back into the fray.

Nowhere is this more evident than in his most recent column, A Billet-Doux for the Met, in which, not very doucement, he tells the museum's next (as yet unnamed) director what to do when he takes over the job that Hoving himself once held.

There's nothing wrong with recommending future directions for the Met-in-transition. I did it myself, here. But such ruminations should be grounded in firm knowledge of the current state of the museum and of professional practice. Hoving's shaky grasp of both would not win him any gold medals on the uneven bars. (Yes, I watched Olympic gymnastics yesterday.)

Among Hoving's flubbed suggestions for the Met:

---"Solve the chronic deficits, which are beginning to look like permanent acquisitions." In fact, the most recent annual report, fiscal 2007, showed a sizable surplus of $2.05 million.

---The Met should "deaccession at least 10 percent of all the holdings" and "slow down, even stop collecting." Don't get me started. Likewise for: "Show but do not collect modern or contemporary art (except in the most minimal numbers)" and "make deals with the Museum of Modern Art to give or sell the Met works that are arguably 'old modern masters' by now." Do I really have to rebut these eccentric notions? Go here and here. It's ironic that Hoving, who got his museum into a heap of trouble over deaccessioning, should now be advocating sweeping disposals. In addition, the idea that an encyclopedic museum should excise the last chapter ignores the importance of seeing the art of our own time in historical context.

---"Mount shows that teach about the wonders of art and are more ambitious than the one-man omnibus everything-including-the-kitchen-sink 'catalogue' shows that are current." What about two theme shows opening this fall---Art and Love in Renaissance Italy and Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C.? Do they not count as ambitious and instructive? And what's wrong with comprehensive, scholarly catalogues?

---"The subterranean restaurant beneath the Medieval Sculpture Hall is unappealing." (Okay, I'll grant him that.) "Use its space for a grandiose crypt for a Medieval Treasury." As Hoving the medievalist well knows, they already have a Medieval Treasury at the Met's uptown outpost, the Cloisters. And newly renovated and reinstalled medieval galleries will open in the Fifth Avenue headquarters this November.

But the biggest Hoving howler is this:

The current director was instructed 30 years ago to consolidate the revolution of the late 1960s and '70s [i.e., Hoving's]. Three decades of consolidation is a bit much.

As I recall, the "current director" (who's that again?) was brought in to redress the imbalance between showmanship and scholarship that was Hoving's problematic legacy. "Consolidation of the revolution" was not the mandate: A return to core values was. As Philippe de Montebello takes off for Abu Dhabi (and perhaps also for Qatar, if Kate Taylor's report in the NY Sun is to be credited), it's safe to say there are few who believe that his distinguished reign at the Met was "a bit much."

You can't get too much of a good thing.