The art world has greeted the hiring of the new director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York with a mixture of intrigue and disappointment.
Max Hollein – the son of postmodern architect Hans Hollein – is an Austrian art historian known for his star power, having been spotted in the European art scene with Yoko Ono, and in fashion circles, having married Austrian fashion designer Nina Hollein.
He’s a money man with a knack for courting financial folks, since he partnered with Deutsche Bank on a multimillion-dollar art collection, and has personality underneath his slick exterior, posing in a pair of yellow rubber boots to promote a $42m donor campaign at a German art museum.
Hollein is taking an earnest first step into Fifth Avenue “to provide the guidance, energy and support needed to lead this beloved institution into the future and inspire its audiences in New York and around the world”, he said in a statement.
However, with the recent flurry of prominent female museum figures leaving their positions, like Helen Molesworth, who was recently fired from her post as chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (Moca), and Laura Raicovich, known for her activist-fueled programming as the Queens Museum director, who stepped down, the Met’s hire has been seen as regressive by some. Hollein is the 10th white male director of the Met.
In the New York Times, Liza Oliver, assistant professor of art history at Wellesley College, wrote that “his hiring sheds light on the implicit biases of museum culture”.
“It feels like a very ho-hum decision on the part of the Met, almost like electing an old pope who will only be around for a few years until someone better comes along,” said Marc Wehby, the co-founder of Kravets-Wehby Gallery in New York. “Such a formidable institution as the Met would be better suited with someone more dynamic, like Michael Govan from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I think a lot of people were surprised Hollein got the gig.”
Hollein shines on paper, having previously directed the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, among a handful of others, overseeing a multimillion-dollar renovation and increase in visitors during his 15-year tenure. Recently, he was the director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where he helped introduce the translation of all exhibition materials into Spanish to broaden their reach and launched a Minecraft map of Egyptian pyramids to involve a younger audience. In the New Yorker, Andrea K Scott wrote that “it will be thrilling to see what a man who once paraphrased Goethe to describe his twinned interest in art and finance – ‘two souls are dwelling in my chest’ – has in store for the museum.”
In a recent interview, Hollein has offered insight into his vision. “Today’s museum is not just a place you visit – it’s an avatar for culture at large,” he said, adding: “We want to talk with the viewer, not at them.”
To Joanne Greenbaum, an artist who has worked in New York City for over 35 years, said the announcement of his new directorship is beside the point. “When I read the news about Hollein, I thought, ‘Well of course another white male is chosen,’” she said. “I’m sure he is more than qualified but it’s just the same old status quo, it doesn’t mean anything to me.”
Hollein arrives at a difficult time with a new admission policy charging out-of-towners a higher entrance fee (a decision that’s led to some disapproval). Could he crunch the numbers to abolish the Met’s entrance fee hike?
“Something I would like Hollein to change is the new stupid policy of charging non-New Yorkers a hefty entrance fee, he should go back to the ‘pay what you wish’ entrance structure,” adds Greenbaum. “It seems very wrong to me on so many levels to charge an out-of-towner more than a New Yorker.”
It is up for question whether he can foot the funding for the planned $600m wing for modern and contemporary art, which is slated to be launched for the Met’s 150th anniversary in 2020. The museum has been without a director for over a year since Thomas Campbell stepped down and left the Met with a $10m deficit in 2016. Many are hoping its tumultuous past will come to a swift end, while focusing more on contemporary art.
“The fact is that the Met should be showing and collecting contemporary art, if it doesn’t, it will seem less vital and relevant to contemporary audiences,” writes Washington Post art critic Sebastian Smee. “It will also miss out on the many opportunities provided by living artists and recent art to shed light on its historical collections.”
Hollein has spoken publicly about surviving and thriving as a collecting institution. “Behind every success story there are numerous failures,” he told Forbes. “You try 20 ideas, approach 30 potential sponsors and maybe less than a dozen projects come to fruition, of which a handful are successful. You generally deal with one small crisis after another. But in the end, you know you’re working on something that will excite people.”
He doesn’t shy away from political art, as he was the force behind Contemporary Muslim Fashions, a group exhibition opening on 22 September at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which has been met with controversy. “Being asked not to cover the Muslim world – nearly 25% of the population – because we should stick with our western values, seems like a strange view of what a museum can do,” Hollein told the Art Newspaper.
But Sheida Soleimani, an Iranian-American artist and art professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, was disappointed by his appointment. “I’ve worked with plenty of straight white male curators, and many of them have been very good to me,” she said. “I have no doubt that Hollein is good at his job, but as a woman of color and for many other artists like myself, this is a reflection of many obstacles on the road ahead and an impediment to progress.
“You would hope that institutions such as the Met would be thoughtful about the lack of people of color and women in positions of power within the art world. I’m disappointed to see that they were not considerate in this decision.”