Archive for the 'GripeBox' Category
They listen…they really listen
Fashion Week Daily reports that the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute ball, aka the Party of the Year, aka Ahhh-nna’s Party (so-named after its longtime chairman, Vogue editor Anna Wintour), will attempt to become less commercial next year and the guest list will focus on traditional museum supporters rather than US-magazine style celebs. Which means, I suppose, that the implicit criticism in Rogues’ Gallery of what the event has become isn’t actually as “cynical” as a Vogue Magazine flack has claimed. As George Bernard Shaw once wisely observed, the power of accurate observation is often described as cynicism by those who do not possess it.
Roar, Lion
Was the two-month absence of Rogues’ Gallery from the New York Public Library an accident–or a plot? I don’t know, but something’s changed since the New York Observer’s Reid Pillifant first asked the question two weeks ago. Today, he’s back with a happy update. Whether or not, as the Observer wondered (and still does), the book’s initial absence was the result of some misguided attempt to cozy up to powerful trustees or donors, as far as I’m concerned, the curiouser-and-curioser episode has come to a satisfactory conclusion. But just as its beginning sent me to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderful, its end led me to seek out The Wizard of Oz, who reminded me of the time the Cowardly Lion came to see him. The following is a brief excerpt of that scene from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz:
“I have come for my courage,” announced the Lion, entering the room. “Very well,” answered the little man; “I will get it for you.” He went to a cupboard and reaching up to a high shelf took down a square green bottle, the contents of which he poured into a green-gold dish, beautifully carved. Placing this before the Cowardly Lion, who sniffed at it as if he did not like it, the Wizard said: “Drink.” “What is it?” asked the Lion. “Well,” answered Oz, “if it were inside of you, it would be courage. You know, of course, that courage is always inside one; so that this really cannot be called courage until you have swallowed it. Therefore I advise you to drink it as soon as possible.” The Lion hesitated no longer, but drank till the dish was empty. “How do you feel now?” asked Oz. “Full of courage,” replied the Lion, who went joyfully back to his friends to tell them of his good fortune.
I’m taking a few days off from Gripebox. Happy Fourth of July. God Bless America.
“A blockbuster exhibition of human achievements and flaws.” –NY Times Book Review
Rogues’ Gallery is “a blockbuster exhibition of human achievements and flaws,” Amy Finnerty says in the New York Times Book Review. Finnerty writes at length about the book’s substance and scope as well as its “…pages of Vanity Fair-worthy name-dropping and social-climbing.” Here’s the full review. UPDATE: Finnerty did complain that the book was full of “lurid details” that overwhelmed the museum’s magnificent art. To which a friend in academia responds: “I’d hardly call the plain truth ‘lurid.’” I’d add that the history of art and art collecting is full of lurid human behavior that has always threatened, but never quite succeeded in overwhelming the fruit of human creativity. And on that note, this seems as good a time as any to add what one of New York’s great philanthropists told me sotto voce over dinner earlier this month: “You know why they’re all going crazy, don’t you? You got it all right.”
“The seamy side of philanthropy,” says NY1’s George Whipple
NY1’s Whipple’s World, featuring George Whipple, dropped in on last week’s book signing at Kieselstein-Cord on Madison Avenue and today, brought back this televised report on the party and the book that inspired it.
The More Things Change
The Metropolitan Museum of Art cut its staff by 357 bodies yesterday, buying out some employees and laying off others in response to the worldwide financial markets. As chronicled in Rogues’ Gallery, this sort of retrenchment is nothing new to the Metropolitan. In the past, though, cutbacks involving human beings have alternated with shutdowns of galleries and trimming of programming. Metropolitan chairman Jamie Houghton is the second Houghton to hold that job. The first, his uncle Arthur Amory Houghton, once ripped apart and sold off pages of a rare Shanameh, the Persian equivalent of the Gutenberg Bible, in order to pay his taxes. (Some of its pages now reside at the Metropolitan.) When that sort of thing is done by a museum, it is called de-accessioning. In related museum news, the Met joined with other institutions to try and impede passage of a bill now moving through the New York state legislature that would impose limits on sales of art from its collections–another typical response of museums to economic difficulties. In its story on that move, the New York Times modestly fails to mention its own central role in calling attention to a massive, secret de-accessioning at the Met more than thirty years ago. But it does point out the central issue involved, quoting James C. Dawson, chairman of the state’s Board of Regents’ cultural education committee, who said, “Cultural institutions hold artifacts in trust for the public.” That’s a truth that often eludes museum trustees.
MGTV: “A vivid view into the murky world of the super-rich”
Obsessed with Samantha Ettus has just posted an interview with me about Rogues’ Gallery and much more. “The more impenetrable the subject, the more Michael Gross, magazine journalist and author of 10 books including the bestsellers Model and 740 Park, lives, breathes and relentlessly pursues it,” Ettus says. “His most recent “Tom Wolfe-esque” work of non-fiction, Rogues Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money that Made the Metropolitan Museum, has once again given his audience a vivid view into the murky world of the super rich and has been accompanied by clouds of controversy including banishment from several book outlets frequented by its subjects. He is curious, detailed in his research and has an intuition for intrigue and that is why I am Obsessed with Michael Gross.”
Vox Populi, Pt. 2: “A helluva read!”
“Marched into local bookstore and plunked $30 down for Rogues Gallery, writes a reader of David Patrick Columbia’s New York Social Diary. “COULD NOT PUT IT DOWN ALL WEEKEND !!!!! What a helluva read! Even if you didn’t care one whit about museums, he tells such an exciting, compelling, downright astonishing story that the first thing I want to do is run down to NYC and join the museum! Weird but true. Why is that? Guess it’s that he put some blood and humanity behind the big stone monolith….I want to see every damned picture and bibelot and hunk of tin in the place, now! His book will incite more interest in the museum than anything they themselves could come up with!”
Deep Six
The renegade art critic Charlie Finch and I had a brief (UPDATE: apparently I need to say private) exchange of e-mails late last week that ended up on Page Six in the Post today (Sarcastic Update: somehow [thanks, Charlie]). As Rogues’ Gallery’s parent, I’m glad it’s gotten some Fathers’ Day attention. But one of these days, I hope, someone will write about what’s in the book rather than the continuing brouhaha distraction surrounding its publication.
Vacation, gotta get away…
Sometimes you need to get away from the day to day. Like today. Let’s go to the Cote Fleurie instead, inspired by my latest in Travel + Leisure, a story about a place “defined by what it lacks.”
Lion Ize
Two months after he first discovered its absence and two days after the New York Observer found that Rogues’ Gallery still couldn’t be checked out of from the New York Public Library, the literary agent Richard Curtis (who is not my agent), reminds visitors to his ereads blog that it still can’t be checked out or reserved online–and asks them to buy it, but also to “let your local library know you expect it to carry Rogue’s Gallery.” I am, of course, grateful for his support and suggestions, though it would be nice if those who can’t afford the book could borrow it, as the libraries’ great benefactor Andrew Carnegie (a model philanthropist, as opposed to some) intended. A statement of the NYPL’s mission does appear online, and reflects what Carnegie also knew: “The New York Public Library is one of the cornerstones of the American tradition of equal opportunity. It provides free and open access to the accumulated wisdom of the world…It guarantees freedom of information and independence of thought…It helps ensure the free trade in ideas and the right of dissent.” Nice thoughts.
“Fascinating…insightful…marvelously readable,” says Met Museum’s chief exhibition designer
Though fearful current employees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art can only express themselves sotto voce about Rogues’ Gallery, ex-executives are not so willing to be gagged. “The book is completely fascinating; lucidly and engagingly written,” says Stuart Silver, for many years the museum’s chief exhibition designer. “Your notion that the history of the Met has been a kind of alchemical process, an alembic converting private dross to public gold is apt and insightful. One might say the same for what you accomplished, turning almost 140 years of information into a marvelously readable volume.”
Down the rabbit-hole
Dennis Loy Johnson, author of MOBYLIVES, is scratching his head over the reception of Rogues’ Gallery at the tea party that is cultural society–and its curious absence from the shelves of the New York Public Library. It’s “getting a lot of buzz behind the scenes in New York literary circles,” he writes, “because, well, it’s not getting a lot of in-front-of-the-scenes discussion, and the suspicion is that Gross has a powerful enemy.” (Johnson tagged this post ‘censorship’.)
The Plot Sickens
Today’s New York Observer confirms a story I didn’t want to believe–and didn’t repeat–when it was first reported a month ago: Rogues’ Gallery appears to have been silently banned by the New York Public Library, which received copies of the book from the distributor Baker & Taylor more than six weeks ago but has yet to catalogue the book or allow library cardholders to check it out and read it. (The Queens and Brooklyn libraries are doing good business with it, as are Manhattan bookstores). Annette de la Renta, the Metropolitan Museum trustee who threatened legal action against my publisher and me, and had her lawyers rattle sabers at several New York newspapers, too, is also a trustee of the NYPL. I’ve said this before in this pillar: Maybe it’s a coincidence. “Library officials had no comment,” the Observer’s Reid Pillifant reports. Now, there’s a surprise.
n.b.: Thanks for the proofreading, Rebecca!
“A great historical document,” says David Patrick Columbia
“The strange brouhaha over [Rogues' Gallery] has kidnapped the baby, so to speak,” writes David Patrick Columbia in this morning’s New York Social Diary. “The established ones who preside as cultural assessors of the first order have declared the history ‘rubbish.’ They, of course, would know, having concealed any number of secrets themselves….I liked Michael Gross’ Rogues Gallery. The story of the making of the Met is massive, complex yet simple and dynamic. His research is especially excellent considering that the Met set up roadblocks all along the way.” So what’s the problem with the book, he wonders? “The connoisseurs and their advisers and their minions and their minions’ sycophants tend toward the elitist. Big time. I am and you’re not….The game comes from childhood: I-know-something-you-don’t-know. In this great big town, like any great big town, it’s called power.” Hmmmm.
Is the Rogues Gallery a racist gallery, too?
Even “big” books can’t always cover every aspect of a big story. This anonymous email arrived last night, describing another aspect of the Metropolitan Museum’s story, one I was aware of and hint at in the story of the controversial Harlem on My Mind exhibition of 1969, but didn’t research in greater depth because I was focused on the museum’s leaders and benefactors: “New York journalists and writers tend to concentrate on the glamour and the glitter of the MET and other lesser museums in New York City,” it said. “However, very little or no journalistic attention is paid to New York cultural institutions (including the MET) as elegant sweatshops where curators, librarians, security guards, and a battalion of other workers work exceedingly long hours for meager salaries and under rather arrogant and dictatorial directors. Secondly, the MET continues to epitomize the “FOR WHITES ONLY” ethos, without the signage, that was reminiscent of the American south in terms of their hiring practices and the dearth of blacks and people of color in senior curatorial positions—or, to be perfectly blunt, any positions beyond a security guard or a coat checker. This is the sad case all along Museum mile. And it is my hope, frankly, that President Obama or First Lady Michelle Obama will talk about this in the near future. Even the Museum of the City of New York, located in East Harlem, has no blacks or people of color in senior positions…In my view, New York City would better be served by journalists and writers who take a “Upton Sinclair” approach to cultural institutions in New York City. In many cases, these institutions are “cultural sweatshops” and the wealthy are merely unconcerned, look the other way, or are shielded by museum directors from what actually takes goes on. They are social watering holes for the wealthy and idle rich. As I said previously, I’d rather visit a museum in Europe than step foot again in another museum in New York. I was born in New York.”
Why I love Facebook
A fascinating exchange is taking place on and around my Facebook profile–which has already helped balance the big-media blackout on coverage of Rogues’ Gallery. Earlier today, a longtime employee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art posted a comment in response to the blog post directly below (which was cross-posted on Facebook). It said:
“Everybody loves gossip but it doesn’t change the fact that the Met is one of the greatest cultural institutions in the world with an outstanding collection, brilliant curators and administrators, and generous funders who make it all possible. Everybody has skeletons in their closets, petty jealousies, and disagreements. Everybody. If outing successful and wealthy people earns you a few dollars, great. None of it will make any difference in the end. Great art will triumph over short-lived gossip and sour grapes.”
I responded: “Love this. Finally, someone who works for the museum speaks! [Name omitted], (who worked there for years, folks), if you’d read the book–which I’m willing to bet you haven’t–you’d know it’s about a LOT more than ‘outing,’ ‘gossip’ and ’sour grapes,’ but that’s the Big Lie your longtime employers are promoting because they don’t want people to read the book. Their profoundly anti-historical, anti-democratic attitude, inherited from the founders of the museum, is disgraceful. And it is why you probably haven’t read all I wrote about the ‘outstanding collection, brilliant curators and administrators, and generous funders.’ Your loss!”
She responded, “I see it. I bought it, and am reading it. I think it’s very well written and full of facts and I know the Museum didn’t want staff to talk because of course there are difficulties, complications, and, as I said, some sour grapes. It’s a huge staff current and former. I’ve seen your posts and held my comments which is very difficult for me. I have to take my comment down now because I do believe in confidentiality and that people’s lives should not be written about without their permission and input. I haven’t finished the book but we cannot deny that talking about such people as Jayne [Wrightsman], Annette [de la Renta], etc., without their input is in fact gossip. I wish you the best and do not think I have lost anything as I plan to finish the book.”
To which I responded: “Ka-ching! Another $3.75. Thanks. FYI I just reposted your comment though out of courtesy for you, I did it without your name. I believe in free expression. I also believe that in America, the lives of people who run public institutions SHOULD be written about freely, i.e. without censorship or suppression, or the massaging of PR people who care about image not truth. So I most certainly can and do deny that talking about such people without their input is gossip. It’s a lot more factual than the pretty falsities they spin about their own lives. I hope you will finish the book and then let me know what you think. And thanks for having the courage to defy the book-burners and read it even though they wish you wouldn’t. I respect you for that. Speak out more often. You’ll find it’s addictive as well as its own reward.”
I kind of hope this conversation continues. Even with the names omitted to protect the regretful, it sure beats the cone of silence the museum so wants to impose on discussion of the book!
“This can’t be right.” But it can happen here.
London media blogger Jon Slattery condemns “the whole ghastly business” of the wealthy and litigious trying to chill sales and coverage of Rogues Gallery because it “paints the Metropolitan, its founders and its funders in a less than flattering light.”
“Page-turning,” says the Guardian
England’s Guardian proclaims Rogues Gallery a page-turner. And you can’t even buy the book there!
“Not for sale in the Met gift shop,” says Newsday
Newsday joined the growing ranks of New York newspapers willing to irritate the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its powerful supporters by giving full-page coverage to the “dishy…highly entertaining” Rogues’ Gallery this weekend–and confirming what Met Store employees have said privately, that though its customers often ask for it, it isn’t being sold there. The book ban isn’t surprising, though. The Met Store has done this sort of thing before. Thanks, Newsday.
Quote of the Day: “A fight for New York”
“If The Observer is anything it’s a battle for New York,” Peter W. Kaplan, the just-departed and much-admired editor of the New York Observer, said last week. “It’s the fight for wit, for integrity, for real reporting, for real writing, and for not killing stories even when they irritate the publisher. A fight for the New York idea.”
“Book unveils secrets of the Met.”
“A gripping, glib and gossipy deconstruction of the curators, directors, donors and trustees who dominated the Met since its founding in 1870. Gross’ Met does the right thing infrequently, and then only under duress,” says the Tulsa World of Rogues’ Gallery. “Suppressing its antipathy to the masses…the museum did open its doors on Sundays. But the Met still shames visitors into paying a $20 admission fee, even though the official policy allows anyone to enter with a contribution of as little as a penny….Gross indicts the museum for its ‘public be damned’ attitude and…the extravagance, envy, egotism and mean-spiritedness of the Met’s benefactors….[some of whom] ran the Met to settle scores and score points in New York society.”
Mistakes? I’ve made a few….
A few days ago, the trustees and administrators of the Metropolitan Museum tried to swat away Rogues’ Gallery as a “so-called history” and a “highly misleading” book, but refused (or were unable?) to point out a single error in it. A lawyer for one of its trustees went further, claiming that it contains “false statements” that show an “absolute disregard for the truth.” Strong stuff! In the month since the book was published, however, a mere four errors (in 486 pages) have been pointed out by readers, all of which will be corrected in future printings. For the record, they are:
Page 200: Hermann Göring is described as Nazi Germany’s SS master. That was Heinrich Himmler. Göring was the head of the Luftwaffe.
Page 390: Dienststelle Muehlmann, the Nazi art looting organization, is mis-spelled.
Page 402: The Roger Mehle who married the supermodel Dorian Leigh was the society columnist Suzy’s ex-husband, not her son (who is also named Roger Mehle)
Page 466: Obituaries of museum trustee Jane Engelhard omitted two of her proudest accomplishments, not four as stated in the text.
This is an invitation for eagle-eyed readers to alert me to other errors in the book. Further corrections, once confirmed, will be posted immediately.
“Intriguing and well-researched,” says Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld
Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, the criminologist and author whose exposure of terrorist funding networks inspired a libel suit in England, the subsequent passage of “Rachel’s Law,” designed to protect New York writers from venue-shopping libel tourists, and the Free Speech Protection Act 2009, now before the U.S. Congress, takes sides in the battle over Rogues’ Gallery today in an interview on the web site frontpage.com. “The most recent casualty [of libel tourism],” she writes “is Michael Gross and his intriguing and well researched book Rogue Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum….The unauthorized book describes among others, a New York socialite Anne E. de la Renta, who serves on the influential boards of trustees New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New York Public Library. So pernicious are British libel laws, that the mere threat of such suit was enough to kill the book’s sales there and chill its promotion in the U.S. This, as [a] New York Times editorial concluded, ‘is bad for the writer[s] and bad for everyone.’”
UPDATE: Ehrenfeld has also taken up the cause of Rogues’ Gallery at Forbes.com.
Banned in Britain…at the Met…and in the Big Apple?
Cityfile has picked up the story of the effective ban on Rogues’ Gallery in England and wonders if the saber rattling aimed at the book has been heard in New York newsrooms, too. As Francis Urquhart, the fictional Prime Minister of England in a trilogy of political novels (later made into a TV series starring Ian Richardson, above), often said, “You might very well think that; I couldn’t possibly comment”
Gold for Goldfinger
“Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s shiny goddess is certainly perfect in a setting named after a metals magnate who inspired the James Bond villain Goldfinger,” Bloomberg art critic Linda Yablonsky writes in a review of the Metropolitan Museum’s newly renovated Charles Engelhard Court, going on to note that Engelhard’s “eccentric biography is retailed in Michael Gross’s new Rogues’ Gallery.” She finds the new courtyard “impersonal and antiseptic.” After a visit on Monday, I thought it palatial but glacial–rather like the complex lives of the family it is named for. I hope Yablonsky hasn’t risked her access to the Met with that mention; she’s the only art critic in the county who has dared speak the name of the three-week old book that has proved to be anathema to the museum and its powerful supporters in society and the media. Truth may be beauty, but not in the glass house that is the Engelhard Court. Bravo to Bloomberg, which covers the museum without fear or favor.
The Met speaks (or at least, a few employees do)
Several e-mails arrived in the last 24 hours from employees at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One came from inside the Metropolitan bookstore, where the book is apparently banned: “I just find it amusing how many people ask for it.” Another was from someone who works in the museum proper: “I simply wanted to express many thanks [to you] for writing the book Rogue’s Gallery. As a current MET employee, the things I’ve read in [the book] all ring true. I personally think the media is grossly–and intentionally–misinterpreting your objective and concept in writing Rogue’s Gallery.” Needless to say, I won’t reveal who these notes came from.
Speaking of libel tourism….
Writing in London’s Independent, Alice Azania-Jarvis, author of its Pandora column, reveals that the threat of libel tourism is why the book-loving British can’t buy Rogues’ Gallery. As the New York Times so wisely editorialized yesterday, saber-rattling by “wealthy and litigious people” is not only “bad for writers,” it’s “bad for everyone.”
Oh, Canada
“Finally, a book about art and the wealthy,” says Maclean’s, the Canadian newsweekly. “Michael Gross’s unauthorized look at the Metropolitan Museum of Art…starts with its first director, a fake Italian count–neither the Met’s first nor last acquisition of dubious title. There’s also J. Pierpont Morgan and various Rockefellers, Anna Wintour and Johnny Rotten, plus art scandals, vicious social manoeuvring and wretched excess of all sorts, all part of the story of America’s foremost temple to art and riches.
Truth is beauty
From this morning’s editorial decrying libel tourism in The New York Times: “If authors believe they are too vulnerable, they may be discouraged from taking on difficult and important topics, like terrorism financing, or from writing about wealthy and litigious people. That would not only be bad for writers, it would be bad for everyone.”
“A terrific tale…stuff that more people should know,” says USA Today
“As journalist Michael Gross shows in his history of the gentlemen and geniuses, barbarians and social-climbers who have run the Met since it was founded in 1870, proximity to the glorious art of humanity doesn’t necessarily improve the humans who document, collect and display it,” writes Maria Puente in USA Today. ” Great collections aren’t built on generosity and genteel spirit alone — try egomania and tax deductions. Also fraud, theft, greed, arrogance, anti-Semitism and snobbery…What a passel of pooh-bahs they were. Morgans and Rockefellers, Astors and Wrightsmans, Sulzbergers and Lehmans bestride the boardroom, while curators and directors labor (and plot) in the galleries…Gross demonstrates he knows his stuff. It’s a terrific tale…gossipy, color-rich, fact-packed …What Gross reveals is stuff that more people should know.”
Hail to thee, blithe spirit
Madame Arcati, the UK media blog, has entered the ring with a stirring defense of Rogues’ Gallery. “Indisputably,” writes the pseudonymous blogger named for an eccentric medium in a Noel Coward play “Gross…hit a raw nerve about a national institution. What is unacceptable is the suspected exercise of informal social power to, in effect, banish a book.” UPDATE: Once again, the comments are priceless, if not SFW or for households with small children.
Who do YOU trust?
Two top officials of the Metropolitan Museum of Art have offered violently opposing opinions on Rogues’ Gallery. One is the prevailing opinion of the Manhattan plutocracy, too. What do you think?
Harold Holzer, the museum’s current Senior Vice President for External Affairs, says: “A so-called ‘history’ of The Metropolitan Museum of Art that ignores its mission, and blurs the distinction between gossip and fact, is not only insensitive but highly misleading.” (He refused to be specific.)
Daniel Herrick, Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer of the museum from 1968 until 1985, and then the CFO and Treasurer of the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., says: “There’s so much more in Rogues’ Gallery than I, even after working there for seventeen years, could possibly have imagined or known. The book represents a prodigious piece of work (with some 37 pages of notes and bibliography) about those who created and operate this nations’ leading museum of art. It’s simply great theatre. As giants of our country’s recent history stride across the stage of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, some of these characters stand taller than others, set apart by their intimately described eccentricities, foibles, and motivations. Each, however, has been bound by their own role, whatever it may be, so deeply involved in our house of treasures. We’re indebted to Mr. Gross for setting the scene as one century has closed and we stand on the cusp of the next. It’s difficult to see, though, how future people and events could even conceivably carry the drama and excitement of this era that’s been so well turned out in Rogues’ Gallery.”
Shine a light
“You are to be commended for shining a light on the highest levels of hypocrisy in New York Society,” writesChristopher London, editor of ManhattanSociety.com. Either that or condemned!
Vox Populi
My two favorite comments so far on my Huffington Post essay today:
dstanley wrote: “I think H.L. Mencken described these people best: ‘Out of this class comes the grotesque fashionable society of our big towns already described. Imagine a horde of peasants incredibly enriched and with almost infinite power thrust into their hands, and you will have a fair picture of its habitual state of mind. It shows all the stigmata of inferiority — moral certainty, cruelty, suspicion of ideas, fear.’”
And iridium53 said: “Argumentum ad crumenam,” the Latin phrase (meaning an argument to the purse) describing the logical fallacy of concluding that a statement is correct simply because the speaker is rich.
Down the rabbit-hole?
“People [are] wondering why the New York media don’t have much of a line, even a hostile one, on [Rogues' Gallery] yet,” Ron Hogan observes on Galleycat this morning after reading through the online coverage of the book’s off-line reception in its first few days on sale. “Is Michael Gross really the victim of a media elite freeze-out, or is there an alternative explanation? …We don’t know which answer is the right answer, of course, although we do know which one is more entertaining to contemplate—although we suppose if you’re Michael Gross, ‘entertaining’ might not be the word you’d choose to define the situation.” The word I’d choose? “‘Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).” UPDATE: My thoughts on the Rogues’ Gallery kerfuffle are now on The Huffington Post.
The truth hurts (…their feelings)
The trustees and administrators of the Metropolitan Musem of Art have issued their review of Rogues’ Gallery. “A so-called ‘history’ of The Metropolitan Museum of Art that ignores its mission, and blurs the distinction between gossip and fact, is not only insensitive but highly misleading,” museum PR man Harold Holzer tells the New York Observer’s Reid Pillifant, who adds, “The Met declined to comment on Mr. Gross’s specific allegations.”
Some earlier, telling quotations from the museum’s $300,000-a-year mouthpiece:
–“The only kind of books we find even vaguely palatable are those we control.”
–“If we tell you we won’t cooperate, will you go away?”
–“We don’t want you probing and prodding the deepest recesses of the philanthropic and private lives of our trustees and donors.”
A “great book,” says Forbes.com. “Important and splendidly readable.”
Melik Kaylan of Forbes.com, a long-time observer of culture and museums, reviews Rogues’ Gallery–and some of the controversies surrounding it–today. He writes, “Any and all facts that I knew of personally, the author gets absolutely right, which makes me trust much else in the book–and there’s a great deal else, indeed an entire history of the museum beginning from its gradual birth in the 1870s, told as a kind of extended gossip dish, a dense and exhaustively factual one, about the powerful egos that drove it into prominence and kept it there. …I didn’t expect to like the book’s tone, but I found a good 100 pages had gone by before I could even put it down. …Mistresses, inheritance battles, second and third wives, society scandals, personal feuds among Rockefellers, Morgans, Vanderbilts, Astors and the like abound, rather irritatingly, until one realizes that it’s no artificial gimmick: This is indeed what drove the trustees and directors to excel and outdo each other in contributions of all kinds to the museum. …The book is important, and what’s more, splendidly readable. Yet, though published the first week of May, it hasn’t yet received a significant review. It’s worth the price of admission just for the last chapter’s discussion of the future. With the big-moneyed older generation fading without having attracted a younger phalanx of new money into the board of trustees, and with the wider economy tottering, it’s not clear how the Met will bring in fresh funds or keep its place as the world’s preeminent museum. Gross’ book makes us understand how the Met works in reality and, in a stealthy way, makes us care anew about our greatest cultural treasure.”
Freedom to Suppress: The Empire Strikes Back vs. Rogues’ Gallery
Jesse Kornbluth, writing for Headbutler, reveals the full story of the campaign against Rogues’ Gallery, and has this to say about it: “George Orwell wrote something to the effect: When I see a policeman beating a worker, I don’t have to wonder whose side I’m on. That’s how I feel here. A rich woman has used a two-ton gorilla to threaten a writer, and, for whatever reason, silence has descended. I have no brief for Michael Gross or his book. But I care a great deal about the powerful abusing their power. And that’s what seems to be happening here.” Jesse’s post is on Huffington Post, too.
“Yummy!” says The Daily News
George Rush and Joanna Molloy have once again caught the rest of the town snoozing. They call Rogues’ Gallery “yummy” in today’s Daily News while hinting about a legal attack on the book. There’s a review in today’s News, too. “The nut of Gross’ story is the power and influence wielded behind the scenes by the monied,” says Sherryl Connelly. She also calls the book “salacious” and “exhaustive,” praises (and damns) the depth of research behind it, and says it “forays into the personal, sometimes seamy, histories of major names”–singling out the late Jane Englehard, Annette de la Renta and Jayne Wrightsman. If it wasn’t for all that research, those forays wouldn’t be so revealing and the legal sabres might not be rattling.
A review worth reading: “Skulduggery in the sculpture gallery, intrigue among the antiquities…”
Readers of Rogues’ Gallery are filling the (possibly not-so) curious silence to date of mainsteam media book reviewers concerning Rogues’ Gallery. An S. McGee, amazon-certified to be using a real name, has penned a thoughtful and not uncritical view of the book that I very much like despite its quarrels with me. Calling it a “a peek behind the scenes at the shenanigans of the donors, trustees, curators and directors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art over the nearly 140-year life of that institution,” McGee adds, “Gross tackles the Met’s larger than life personalities with a pen dipped in vitriol and a degree of enthusiasm that has probably caused several coronaries among his targets and set skeletons rattling in closets as enthusiastically as former Met director Thomas Hoving once made the mummies dance.” McGee says Rogues’ Gallery’s “most significant shortcoming” is that “it is the personalities and not the institution that are at the heart of the book.” To that, I plead guilty as charged. The Met is a huge institution and a huge subject and to write both the book I intended and the several others McGee wishes I had written would have taken decades and far more pages than any but the most obsessed would ever want to read. (McGee properly points to several other books, including the recent Loot by Sharon Waxman, a wonderful look at the antiquities trade, that fill those gaps.) As it is, the manuscript of Rogues’ Gallery was trimmed cut by more than a third to produce the final product which runs just under 500 pages, not counting bibliography, source notes and index. I’d like to believe those cuts helped produce what McGee, in the end, decides is “a wonderful book.”
What the….?
Both the bad review referred to below and Tom Hoving’s response have disappeared from amazon.com. Should I take down the posts? Remove the dead links? Continue to shelter the fellow who called me a bottom feeder? Decisions, decisions….
Hoving into view
Tom Hoving, the influential former director of the Metropolitan Museum, has waded into the sometimes muddy puddle of the amazon customer reviews of Rogues’ Gallery, responding to the reviewer who called me a “bottom feeder” and doesn’t like Hoving much, either. Play nice, kids!
Cone of Silence
Cityfile wonders about the coverage, or rather, some curious gaps in it, of Rogues’ Gallery in the mainstream press.
#33 With a Bullet
Rogues’ Gallery hit #33 on the Book Sense independent bookstore non-fiction bestseller list today.
Where no man has gone before….
A customer review on amazon.com calls Rogues’ Gallery “a gossipy hatchet job on the private lives of several of the museum trustees” and the author “the sort of bottom feeder who can find something sinister in just about anyone or anything.” Some might consider that praise. My feeling? Better a strong reaction than none at all.
Rogues Gallery Live at The Strand
Watch last night’s discussion of Rogues Gallery at The Strand by clicking on my name below:
“Great theater–drama and excitement,” says Met Museum CFO
“Wow,” says Daniel Herrick, Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1968 until 1985, and subsequently the CFO and Treasurer of the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. “There’s so much more in Rogues’ Gallery than I, even after working there for seventeen years, could possibly have imagined or known. The book represents a prodigious piece of work (with some 37 pages of notes and bibliography) about those who created and operate this nations’ leading museum of art. It’s simply great theatre. As giants of our country’s recent history stride across the stage of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, some of these characters stand taller than others, set apart by their intimately described eccentricities, foibles, and motivations. Each, however, has been bound by their own role, whatever it may be, so deeply involved in our house of treasures. We’re indebted to Mr. Gross for setting the scene as one century has closed and we stand on the cusp of the next. It’s difficult to see, though, how future people and events could even conceivably carry the drama and excitement of this era that’s been so well turned out in Rogues Gallery.”
“Highly entertaining” but banned in Met bookstore–Bloomberg.com
Introducing “Secrets, Phonies Animate Lively Met Museum History,”an interview about Rogues’ Gallery for Bloomberg’s Muse, its executive editor, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic Manuela Hoelterhoff calls the book “highly entertaining,” and reports something I assumed but didn’t know, that the book “is not for sale in the gift shop of the lofty art house on Fifth Avenue.”
#1 (with an asterisk)
Rogues’ Gallery, which already hit this spot at Barnes & Noble, is now the best-selling book on art (and #1 in urban sociology, too) on amazon.com, too.
Page Six on Fifth
Today’s Page Six in the New York Post covers the Rogues’ Gallery book party.
