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Making the Mummies Cringe
Does the Metropolitan Museum of Art practice censorship behind the scenes? After its recent, fabulous, sex-charged show of German art of the 1920s, Glitter and Doom, you wouldn’t think so, but arts journalist Judith H. Dobrzynski says otherwise. A new book, Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, by Danny Danziger, described by its publisher as “oral history at its best” has apparently been delayed and given a thorough cleansing after an “uproar at 1000 Fifth Avenue” when galleys were sent to the museum employees and trustees who’d been authorized to speak to Danziger by the Met’s administration. I don’t know what got cut in the “scissors job” that followed, as Dobrzynski calls it, but there weren’t many eyebrow-raisers in the sweet, earnest, unexpurgated version I read. Longtime trustee and benefactress Jayne Wrightsman, for instance, said almost nothing in the two pages she was originally allotted that have now reportedly disappeared. “I very much miss the museum when I am away from it,” was a typical Jayne gem. Kind of makes you long for an unauthorized book about the Met, doesn’t it?
May 18th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
[…] Liz Smith has it first: the title of my next book on the Metropolitan Museum of Art will be Rogues’ Gallery. La Liz gets a few more things right, too. The Met is “remarkable, incredibly valuable and super-important,” and so is its incredibly rich story, which is why I chose to write it. The Met has refused to let a photo archive “sell photos of the building for the book jacket. (Even though the museum is owned by the city and sits on public land.)” And the Met “will survive” my daring to look at its history without its blessing. If all goes according to plan, Rogues’ Gallery will be published next year, despite the museum’s attempts to stop it. Meantime, you can read Gripebox on the museum’s relationship to a free press here , here and here. […]