"A blockbuster exhibition of human achievement and flaws." --New York Times Book Review
"Explosive." --Vanity Fair
"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.”–-USA Today
"Tantalizing…irresistable…one of the year’s most entertaining books.” --The Daily Beast
"Yummy." --New York Daily News
"Riveting and accurate. My God! The back-stabbing and Machiavellian conspiracies! I had no idea. I learned a lot." -Tom Hoving
"Michael Gross has proven once again that he is a premier chronicler of the rich. Rogues' Gallery is an insightful, entertaining look at a great institution-with all its flaws and all its greatness." -Gay Talese
"The author clearly relishes dishing the dirt, but he also offers a supremely detailed history of the museum...Gross’s portrait of Met politics is sharp and well-constructed. A deft rendering of the down-and-dirty politics of the art world." --Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2009
“Sprawling history…..Behind-the-scenes dirt and an intriguing look at the symbiosis of culture and cash.” –Publishers Weekly, March 30, 2009
The first independent, unauthorized look at the epic saga of the nation’s greatest museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogues’ Gallery is an endlessly entertaining follow-up to Michael Gross’ bestselling social history 740 Park. Gross pulls back the shades of secrecy that have long shrouded the upper class’s cultural and philanthropic ambitions and maneuvers–and paints a revealing portrait of a previously hidden face of American wealth and power, a rich, satisfying, alternately hilarious and horrifying look at America’s upper class, and what is perhaps its greatest creation.
On Sale: May 5, 2009 * Price: $29.95 * ISBN: 978-0-7679-2488-7 (0-7679-2488-6)
Media Contact: Rachel Rokicki at Random House 212-782-8455 or rrokicki (at) randomhouse (dot) com
The Latest News From Rogues' Gallery
Rogues, blogged
Ten months after publication, Rogues’ Gallery continues to draw readers and praise around the world. This week, three blogs cited the book. Pravdakino, by Indonesian film and video student Veronika Kusumaryati calls it “worthy reading but in some parts, regrettable due to its writer’s love of gossip and drama. But I still think it should be read by art history students and those who are curious about the life of the rich people who made USA.” Turn The Page by Birmingham, Alabama, writer Susan Swagler, recommends it. And I’m A Domestic Goddess, a blog by an anonymous “mother, wife and daughter” in Manila, The Phillipines, says it’s “ripe with gossip about some of NYC’s most moneyed families, the Morgans, the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers” and “provides much insight into one of the country’s beloved and cherished cultural institutions.”
A reader speaks
This customer review of Rogues’ Gallery was posted recently by marilynnewyork on barnesandnoble.com. “I heard this author speak at the Mid-Manhattan Library a few months ago. He was such a fabulous speaker, I recommend him to all history aficionados — especially Manhattan history — what a great dinner speaker he would make. If you live in NYC, you’re always curious about what makes Manhattan tick. Why are the lives of the rich and famous people who contribute to the Metropolitan Museum and to the New York Public Library … so protected from criticism by the media including the New York Times? This author tells all. More than once I wanted to go — ‘Aha! So that’s what happened. Wow!’ To a reader who just wants Art alone … that’s not the main feature of this book. The reader will get REALITY — the people whose lives are entwined with the founding and development of this great museum. And it ain’t all pretty. But it’s a wonderful story.”
A Medal for Montebello
Bob Dylan, Robert Caro, Clint Eastwood, Milton Glaser, Theodore Sorenson, Maya Lin and Metropolitan Museum of Art director emeritus Philippe de Montebello were among the twenty recipients of 2009 national medals of arts and humanities, bestowed by President Obama at the White House yesterday. Montebello was praised for revitalizing the museum. I hate to rain on his parade but I thought that happened under his predecessor, the late Tom Hoving. But what do I know. Kudos, Phil.
What’s So Funny About Art, Knowledge and Understanding?
“Tapestry Tom” Campbell, latest director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has just announced the latest fruits of its antiquities loan agreement with the government of Italy–a display of twenty silver objects found near Pompeii. “The presentation of these splendid works in New York, where they will be viewed by millions of visitors over the next four years, will deepen the public’s knowledge and appreciation of ancient art, and will contribute immeasurably to their understanding of its significance,” Campbell said. As is usual with the museum, its head did not explain how they got here, or mention the agreement made under duress by his predecessor that brought this bounty to New York. For that, Gripebox respectfully refers you to Rogues Gallery, where the cultural crimes that underlay the collaboration are revealed. (Image of the Moregine Silver from artdaily.org)
Moguls in Lust, Wintour in Spring
Molly Fisher at the New York Observer’s Daily Transom has uncovered the new subtitle and a bit about the new jacket that’s going on Rogues’ Gallery for its paperback edition, out in May. She writes, “Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money that Made the Metropolitan Museum has been recast as Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret Story of the Lust, Lies, Greed, and Betrayals that Made the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lust and betrayals! And should those prove inadequately intriguing, the cover image of the Met will be replaced with a celebrity photo collage featuring Anna Wintour, among others.”
Me (and my big mouth)
Blogger Father Tony from Queer New York was at my talk at Books & Books in Bal Harbour last week, and just posted the video above, introducing it this way: “In the video snippet…he is talking about a lady of mysterious pedigree [Jane Mannheimer, the future Jane Engelhard] but listen through to the end for the stunning revelation and the reason why a certain prominent NYC couple did their best to block this book.” Love that. I also love his description of Rogues’ Gallery as “something sweet and packed with carbo-facts rather than protein-stats.” Thanks, Father Tony and Happy Valentine’s Day to you, too.
A note of explanation
Janet M. Schrock, Ph.D., a docent at the John and Mabel Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, wrote to say her docents’ book club had read Rogues’ Gallery, and were concerned about a passage on page 54, that describes Ringling’s purchase of antiquities of questionable authenticity from the Luigi Palma di Cesnola collection at the Metropolitan Museum decades ago. I described that as “fitting.” Why, Schrock wrote, “is it fitting that a circus owner (and one of the richest men in America during the 1920’s) should purchase Metropolitan mistakes? Is this a prejudice against circus owners, Floridians or people who start museums in the South?”
I replied (oddly enough, en route to Florida for several talks about the book there): “I considered Cesnola’s reign at the Met, indeed his entire career, something of a circus in the colloquial use of that term, with him as a ringmaster, and only meant to refer to that—nothing else. Indeed, as a lover, as well as an author, of social history, I am familiar with Mr. Ringling’s career, his fine taste, and your museum through the great book Twilight of Splendor, and would never, ever, seek to impugn him or his accomplishments. Ditto the circus, which I attended annually as a child, and still sometimes visit when the opportunity presents itself.” I neglected to say that I like Florida and Floridians, too, so am glad the Ringling book club asked me to post this item, which gives me the chance to amend it.
Un-trust-worthy, perhaps (but refreshingly honest , too)
“The secret to a long and happy run on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s board of trustees is MYOB,”–mind your own business–Staten Island’s outgoing borough representative on the cultural giant’s board, Allan Weissglass, told the Staten Island Advance last week in an astonishing but revealing burst of candor. “We try hard to not get in the way,” he was quoted as saying, explaining his belief that a trustee’s job is not to oversee operations. Weissglass, president of a New Jersey pigment-making company and a dairy that’s been in his family for generations, also seemed to reveal his motive for being a (sadly typical) see-nothing do-nothing trustee for a staggering fifteen years: “His favorite projects at the museum,” reported Michael Fressola, “are by-invitation, private, after-hours views, with receptions, refreshments and live music.” Yes, going to the museum when it’s closed to the public is a dirty job, especially when you’re the public’s representative, but someone has to do it. (I’m sending Weissglass a copy of Rogues’ Gallery gratis so he can learn about the blood, sweat and tears it took to force the museum board to accept public representatives.)
Shiny Happy People
Shannon Donnelly, social columnist of The Palm Beach Daily News, aka the famous Shiny Sheet, heralded the Rogues’ Gallery tour’s coming circuit of south Florida in yesterday’s paper. “Certain PB folks with bones rattling in their closets are feeling skittish since hearing author Michael Gross is visiting,” she writes, before assuring them I’m not coming to report on them.
You’ve got to get up early….
….to be director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas P. Campbell, the latest man in that job, tells the Wall Street Journal today, explaining that his toughest challenge has been starting work at 8 AM daily and not stopping until evening. Phew. The museum’s uphill PR campaign to make Campbell a compelling public presence continues, aided by the bedazzled local media, and for once, Campbell comes bearing some news, albeit not very new news, the appointment (last September) of Alejandro Santo Domingo, 32, to the museum’s board, and finally noting the obvious: “‘Going forward, a new generation of collectors and supporters will become a bigger part of boards, not only at the Met,’ Mr. Campbell predicted.” (If I were Wall Streeter Denis Kelleher, appointed to the board in November, I’d be a little put out by the omission of my name.) The Journal describes young Santo Domingo as a financier, but also fails to note that his experience is mostly confined to working for his father, the uber-wealthy Colombian industrialist Julio Mario Santo Domingo of 740 Park. Neither does the Journal challenge Campbell’s biggest whopper: “We have nothing to hide,” he says. Then why ban Rogues’ Gallery from the Met store, Tom? CORRECTION: A photo originally run with this item was of Santo Domingo’s brother Andres and his wife, not Alejandro Santo Domingo.
Bad Times
In its latest genuflection before the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Arts section of The New York Times has ignored the newspaper’s history as well as the museum’s. In today’s lead article on repairs to damaged art, reporter Randy Kennedy writes that such restorations are conducted in “a kind of seclusion unusual for the museum.” The italic emphasis is mine, for in truth, operating in seclusion is business as usual there–as any Times reporter or editor with access to its archives should know. The Met’s long history of willful obfuscation, opacity and disingenuousness verging on mendacity emerged as one of the key narrative threads in Rogues Gallery. Academics, authors, art historians and New York Times reporters alike have hit the brick wall of the Met’s fear of exposure. It only cooperates with those it can control, as its chief flack blithely admits. In that, at least, he, for one, is transparently honest.
Who’s Next?
Last night, I attended a Fifth Avenue book club that had read Rogues’ Gallery, and I was asked about the future leadership of the Metropolitan Museum. A good question. Jamie Houghton, the museum’s chairman, shed his second most important title last month when the 74-year old confirmed he would step down as the senior fellow and longest serving member of the governing board of the Harvard Corporation in June (a resident of Corning, New York, Houghton sold his apartment at the Majestic in February 2008 and no longer maintains a home in New York City). His vice chairmen are Henry B. Schact, also 74, a managing director of Warburg Pincus, the private equity firm (he used to run Lucent), S. Parker Gilbert, now about 77, who retired as chairman of Morgan Stanley in 1990, and the youngster of the bunch, Annette de la Renta, who turned a spry 70 on Christmas eve, shortly after getting a hip replacement. Each chairs one or more of the museum’s most powerful committees–Nominating, Acquisitions, Investment and Finance–and serves on the all-powerful executive committee, which has few other members with the stature to equal past museum chairmen like Robert Lehman, Arthur Houghton, Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger and C. Douglas Dillon. Too bad Las Vegas doesn’t lay odds on such things. Gripebox will watch developments closely and hereby solicits any and all information about potential candidates, favorites and dark horses for the almost-sure-to-be-open-soon top job.
Fifth on Fifth
While Gripebox was taking its recent break, Judith Dobrzynski’s Real Clear Arts blog reported the likelihood that the Metropolitan Museum of Art will rank only fifth among the world’s top museums in total visitors in 2009 with 4.8 million art-lovers passing through its turnstiles compared to 8.5 million at the Louvre in Paris, 5.6 million at London’s British Musem, and about 4.9 million at both its great rival, the National Gallery in Washington, and the Tate Modern, also in London. With budget cuts limiting his options and ability to mount the blockbusters that draw crowds and revenue, this puts new Met director “Tapestry Tom” Campbell in a bind. Hopefully he can summon the spirit of his predecessor, the recently-departed Tom Hoving, and create more excitement than he did in his rookie year. Maybe it’s time he started licking paintings instead of letting visitors poke holes in them.
A Vrai Rogue
Last fall, I spoke at a literary lunch at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas, where I was photographed (above) with a flamboyant bottle blonde character who called himself Mordan and ran a magazine and web site called SFR (for Social and Financial Responsibility) International that wrote up the event. This weekend, I learned that the not-so-responsible Mordan is in jail, revealed as an ex-convict and alleged to be a swindler. The D Magazine’s Sweet Charity philanthropy blog has been all over the story, noting the irony of this rogue’s appearance at a Rogues’ Gallery event. Blogger Jeanne Prejean was kind enough to say I looked uncomfortable in Mordan’s presence, kinder still to say that since that lunch, Rogues’ Gallery has become “a publication sensation….thanks to a word-of-mouth wave.” Nothing mordan(t) about that.
“Brutally detailed…a very rare read.”
Lisa Feldmann, the editor-in-chief of the German magazine Annabelle, which ran the review of Rogues’ Gallery mentioned below, tells me it reads as follows: “Brutally detailed…A very rare read about the impudent team mentality, the elbow manoeuvres and the impertinence of the American High Society which is at its most impressive when egomania and the will to unconditional power camouflages itself with cultural assiduousness. I am very much looking forward to my next trip to New York - and a visit to the museum. I will have a look now from a very different perspective!”
Some Mercy for Marshall
As predicted here, Anthony Marshall, the ailing 85-year-old only child of Brooke Astor, recently convicted of swindling his mother on her death-bed, isn’t going to prison so soon. An appeals court judge has ruled that the former Metropolitan Museum trustee, ambassador and war hero (and his co-defendent Francis X. Morrisey) can each stay free on a $5,000 bond pending appeals of their convictions, which could take years. The courts have thus shown Marshall–whose lawyers presented no defense at his trial (one was fired as a result)–more mercy than his mother and several fathers, his children, New York society or our local media ever did. Needless to say, the stories reporting this development were short and buried deep in the newspapers I (still) read every morning. But somewhere, Andrea Peyser is screaming.
Wolff in the Doghouse?
On his blog today, the dyspeptic Michael Wolff calls out the New York Times for omitting his name and book title from an anecdote about Rupert Murdoch that appears to be about him in its recent front pager on Fox News honcho Roger Ailes. A clever one, that Wolff, he manages to get a column out of the contretemps. So I figure hey, why not me, too? Wolff is certainly right that the Times, its “who, me?” protests notwithstanding plays favorites–and hardball, too. But Wolff is also being more than a little disingenuous. Not only did the Times print a major, albeit negative, Sunday review of Wolff’s biography of Murdoch, it also made it and its author the subject of a gossipy pre-publication news story, several Times blog items, and a daily review by Janet Maslin. He’s hardly been disappeared. Compare that to Rogues Gallery, which received a small, albeit positive, notice in the Sunday Book Review, and a brief mention in a Home section party column (a daily review assigned to Maslin never appeared), and I’d guess Wolff is more upset that his book was panned (Maslin called it “supercilious yet star-struck” in her opening sentence) and didn’t sell very well, not that he was, as he complains, disappeared. Even a rave in the Times can’t save a book people don’t want to read. Oddly enough, the same thing Wolff is so peeved about happened to me not long ago, only with Murdoch’s Times of London which, in its obituary of the museum titan, ahem, borrowed a quote from the exclusive gripebox story that broke the news of the death of Tom Hoving and credited it to a “friend” of Hoving instead of to me or to gripebox or, for that matter, noting that the source of the quote which held the position of honor at the end of the obit was the author of a book about the Metropolitan Museum. My letter to the editor requesting a correction hasn’t even been acknowledged. That said, I’d rather be disappeared for writing a book that scares the willies out of the powers-that-be (some printing press owners and operators among them) than panned for writing one they didn’t like. (n.b. In the interest of full disclosure, Wolff and I went to college together and just over a decade ago, I brought him to the attention of my editors at New York magazine, who subsequently hired him, beginning his career as a media gadfly.)
Sprechen sie deutsche?
Another German fashion magazine has weighed in on Rogues’ Gallery. And again, I don’t know what it says, though Google Translate makes me pretty sure it’s highly complimentary, indicating that the item calls the book “brutal in its attention to detail when it comes to exposing the bottomless machinations of the cultural temple. Seldom have you read so much about the brazen Movers’ mentality and their insolent elbowing maneuvers in the High Society of America.” Or words to that effect. So thank you to the blog Backstage at Annabelle magazine. All translations welcome.
Mohammed’s Radio Silence
In a story titled “Jihad Jitters” today, The New York Post reports that the Metropolitan Museum of Art is likely to keep artwork that it owns depicting the Islamic Prophet Mohammed locked in its capacious basement when its new Islamic galleries open next year. This would be only the latest of many attempts by the museum to avoid geo-political controversy. In 1982, Mayor Ed Koch threatened the end the museum’s public funding when it cancelled a planned show of archaeological artifacts from the West Bank on the advice of trustee Henry Kissinger. Then-museum director Philippe de Montebello cited fears of a “security risk from radical elements” in explaining the about-face. After Koch countered that the museum was suffering from “speculative fears and political hallucinations,” the museum restored the show to its schedule. Something tells me freedom of expression will not prevail this time. The museum’s Islamic Galleries have already been renamed as the Galleries for the Arts of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia, reports the Post’s Isabel Vincent, who writes that “the Met has a history of dodging criticism and likely wants to escape the kind of outcry that Danish cartoons of Mohammed caused in 2006.” UPDATE: All sixteen comments on the Post web site are highly critical of the musem.
All the News That’s Fit to Paper Over
It took two members of the eminent art journalism squad at the New York Times to write today’s story on the sudden and as-yet-unexplained resignation of Getty museum director Michael Brand. Toward the end, they veer into a brief review of power struggles at museums like the Getty where leadership is split between directors (in charge of art) and administrators (in charge of everything else). That veers quite close to inaccuracy–or to be more polite, a typical Times gloss on the true history of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, which the paper’s culture editors apparently find too messy to be fit to print. In an awkward passage, the paper reports that former Metropolitan Museum director Philippe de Montebello “was said” to have been uncomfortable in just such a position in the 1980s and 1990s until the museum’s president, William Luers, retired in 1999. Typically, the real story, unreported by the Times, is much, much better. To summarize the fascinating tale, which is told in great depth in Rogues’ Gallery, Montebello was outraged by the diminution of his job from the moment he won it in 1977, refused to speak to or attend meetings with the first president he worked with, the late William Macomber, got along only marginally better with Luers, got some of the director’s traditional power back in 1998 when Luers was replaced by David McKinney, and was only given full charge of the museum, with the president reporting to him, when the current occupant of that post, Emily Rafferty, got it in 2005. An irony: back in the day, it was largely the unfettered and fiercely independent reporting on the museum by the Times (then run by A.M. Rosenthal), which led the museum’s board to cut down the director’s job. But those were different…times. UPDATE: Judith Dobrzynski of Real Clear Arts points out that she wrote a far more candid Times story about Montebello and Luers eleven years ago. Different times, too.
Rogues’ Gallery is in Vogue
But alas…it’s in German. Wish I knew what I said.
Reality TV, Russian-Style
RT, the English-language Russian television-and-Internet network, began broadcasting this interview today.
A Special Providence
Sunday’s Providence Journal will name Rogues’ Gallery one of the “best reads” of 2009.
Patience and Fortitude
Over 150 people, only one a friend, came to the mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library the other night to hear the story of Rogues’ Gallery–so many that doors had to be opened to a second conference room to fit them all in. Readers of this blog will understand why it was a deeply satisfying way to end the seven roller-coaster months since the book was published and the four years since I began researching it. Walking to the library, I passed its main building (read Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York on the subject of the research library’s name here) with its two couchant lions out front, Patience and Fortitude. Words to live by, you might say. Happy holidays to all the readers of gripebox. Now, bring on 2010.
Happy Birthday, Annette de la Renta!
Seventy years ago today, Anne France Mannheimer later Anne Engelhard, then Annette Reed and today better known as Metropolitan Museum of Art Vice Chairman Annette de la Renta, was born in the south of France. Joyeux anniversaire et Joyeux Noël from Rogues’ Gallery, Mrs. de la! (photo of Annette, her first husband Samuel Pryor Reed and their daughter Beatrice Reed is from thepeakofchic blog. Though uncredited there, it is by Horst. P. Horst.)
“Riveting,” says the New York Press
In “Who’s Been Naughty and Nice in 2009,” the staff of The New York Press calls Rogues’ Gallery “riveting” on the subject of the “unusual decisions” and “dubious intentions” of generations of museum directors. In related news, Florida’s Naples News says that the museum’s just-retired director Philippe do Montebello will be speaking there in February on the subject of “The Hidden Met.” Sounds like a don’t miss…exhibition.
Trial by Tabloid
Yesterday’s sentencing of former Metropolitan Museum trustee Anthony Marshall to one to three years in prison (which I am told will likely mean eight months with time off for good behavior) for plundering his mother Brooke Astor’s estate is likely still not the end of the saga; there will be an appeal and Marshall may not go to jail until it’s been decided. But today’s tabloids had their predictable fun and the New York Times belatedly ran a story allowing that there was another side to the whole saga–the way Astor treated her son, a subject few have dared broach in public before. One of those few is David Patrick Columbia, whose singularly brave and lonely coverage of the affair has stood out from the beginning, and still does in his latest New York Social Diary entry today. Today’s piece was heralded by an email quoting an anonymous letter Columbia received earlier today. It said: “Try caring for a dementia victim and doing anything right in his/her eyes! Sure the looky-loos on the sidelines will criticise: THEY are not doing the heavy lifting. And this is all besides all those insults of a lifetime of being her son. He felt she owed him, and so do I. How much? none of our beeswax. He was tried and convicted in the press. Is he a danger to society? No. Did he do everything right? No. But jail is ridiculous.” So, too, most of the coverage of this altogether tragic affair.
Mourning Becomes Montebello
Phillipe de Montebello, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has outdone himself in this Sunday Arts featurette from Public Television’s Channel Thirteen website. Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate defines hypocrisy as the act of playing a part on a stage, feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not, and as this column has predicted he would, Montebello hits all three out of the park with this broadcast tribute to the late Tom Hoving, his predecessor, sponsor and mentor at the Metropolitan. More on this subject will be included in a new update chapter for the paperback edition of Rogues’ Gallery, to be published next spring. For now, I’ll offer only a corrective quote from the hardcover. A day after an encounter with Montebello in the early 1990s, the late architect and museum executive Arthur Rosenblatt taped an official museum Oral History (currently locked up, unseen and unread, in the museum’s archives): “He chatted about Tom Hoving [and] used language that is inappropriate and…rough,” Rosenblatt reported. “He’s a shmuck,” the uncensored Montebello said. “A schmuck.” To Hoving’s eternal credit, he said far worse about himself. But his successor’s posthumous embrace is as disingenuous as it was expected.
Campbell in the Soup III
Judith Dobrzynski’s Real Clear Arts, the new (and IMHO journalistically best) arts journal blog, comments on newish Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Campbell’s appearance last week at what sounds like a pretty bland Alliance for the Arts forum. “Mostly, Campbell repeated things he has said before: the Met will have fewer exhibitions, more drawn from the permanent collection, more ‘dossier’ shows like that built around ‘The Milkmaid,’ a redesigned website, better signage and interpretive materials to ‘enliven, inform and invigorate’ the ‘visitor experience,’ and so on,” she reports. Campbell’s rookie year runs out in ten days with nary a misstep…but (having come to office in the brutal January of 2009) nary an accomplishment of note, either. Unfortunately for the British tapestries expert, you only get one shot at being rookie of the year. But look at it this way, with his spotless first-year record, he’s unlikely to suffer from a sophomore slump.
Beasty Fest
The Daily Beast has just named Rogues Gallery one of the best art books of the year. Writer Rachel Wolff calls it “a compelling tale of the money, greed, egotism, and less than kosher acquisitions that have made the Met the megainstitution that it is today. It’s high culture meets lowlife behavior. And Gross has certainly dug up the goods—from Met-sanctioned tomb raiding in Cyprus to the classless antics of power-hungry trustees.” What a lovely way to end the week (for me, if not those trustees).
Chicago Rules
Chicagoan Claire Zulkey’s Zulkey.com (”kind of a humor site, kind of a blog, kind of a repository for my writings, kind of an after-dinner mint for the brain”) has just added a chat with me about Rogues’ Gallery and more to her impressive collection of author interviews. I must have been in quite a mood when I did it; it’s a take-no-prisoners Chicago-rules kind of thing.
Museum on Museum II
Further proof that you can’t keep a good book down (and that some museums have both guts and good taste). A new history book club at The Fairfield Museum and History Center at 370 Beach Road in Fairfield, CT. will be reading and discussing Rogues’ Gallery in its third session on March 24, 2010. For more information and to reserve a spot, call 203-259-1598.
Tom Terrific
David Patrick Columbia remembers Tom Hoving today on New York Social Diary as “an outspoken showman connoisseur [who] had the common touch for those things which brought out the king in all of us.” Having read much of the coverage of Hoving’s life in recent days, it seems that he was best-appreciated by the non-art types he spent his life luring into a once-cloistered world he knew as well as any (he was a Princeton PhD, after all) by demanding it be–and proving it could be–accessible to all. UPDATE: Columbia has run another great item on Hoving. “I last saw him at Georgette Mosbacher’s book party for Michael Gross and his Rogues Gallery biography of the Metropolitan Museum,” Columbia writes. “He was tall man, with a bright yet bemused personality. I asked him what he thought of the book. He said he thought Michael had pretty much got it right. I asked him what he thought of his portrait in the book. He said, ‘Well, I come off like an asshole, but then I am an asshole.’ And he laughed. And I laughed. I vote for him.”
I, A Contest. I, A Fashion Spread.
Curbed, the essential New York real estate blog, has just launched a holiday contest with signed copies of 740 Park and Rogues’ Gallery as the prize. You’ve got to be in it to win it. And 20/20, the eyeglass fashion magazine, has just published an online slide show that includes me in some fancy frames and touts Rogues’ Gallery for its “spectacular investigative reporting and a little bit of tittle-tattle,” according to editor James Spina. “Gross always gets to the heart of the story.”
Tom Hoving, RIP
Tom Hoving, the outsized, ebullient, always controversial leader of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who revolutionized museums around the world in the decade from 1966 to 1976, died this morning after a short bout with cancer first diagnosed late this spring. Hoving, who was also a scholar, curator, commissioner of parks in New York City, bestselling author, magazine editor, raconteur, and perennial thorn in the side of the museum mafia, described his condition with typical candor. “I’m a goner,” he told me in July. “But I have no regrets. I’ve had a terrific life.”
In the days just before his death, his long-time antagonists in the administration of the museum “buried the hatchet” with him, says his friend and colleague Daniel Herrick, the Met’s former chief financial officer. Philippe de Montebello, who Hoving chose and groomed as his successor, later became an open and bitter enemy. But he “stepped up to the plate” and wrote his former boss a conciliatory letter. And the museum may be the site of a future memorial, Herrick said as Hoving approached death at home in New York, his wife Nancy (above with her husband and me at the Rogues’ Gallery launch party in May) at his side. Even his enemies can agree that Hoving was never, ever boring. It will be fascinating to see how he is mourned after decades as the target of “official” disdain. It could be a spectacle worthy of the great showman himself.
Hoving wrote to me last spring, defending his reputation against an Amazon customer reviewer of Rogues’ Gallery–and summed up his career succinctly. “I may have ‘floundered badly’ (while running the Met and afterward) but being the editor-in-chief of Connoisseur magazine, arts editor of 20/20, writing fifteen books of which two were national bestsellers and now a TV personality on artnet.com (’My Eye’ every two weeks in the Magazine) is a helluva way to flounder.” The city of New York and the museum world will be far less fun without him.
UPDATE: News of Hoving’s death quickly spread across the web. And my inbox filled with touching tributes to him. Some of my favorites: “He was a remarkable guy, full of life and humor, a little crazy like the very best of us,” said a child of a former Met president. Added a former Met curator: “What sad news. Tom’s fingerprints are on every aspect of the Met that is progressive and admirable. What PdM [Philippe de Montebello] conserved, Tom largely created.” And finally (for now) this, from a relative of Hoving’s: “He leaves a gaping hole… his energy was so expansive.”
Rogues’ Library
Talk about an amazing “turn” of events: I’ll be speaking about Rogues’ Gallery for the last time this year at the Midtown Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library at 455 Fifth Avenue on Tuesday December 22nd at 6:30 PM. Who says there’s no Santa Claus?
“A definite must-read.”
On my speaking tour of Southern California last month, I met more than a dozen museum directors, trustees and donors, some of whose names would not be out of place on the plaques lining the grand stairs of the Metropolitan Musuem, many of whom had kind words to say about Rogues’ Gallery–a pleasant change from the wrinkled-nose disdain of the Met’s hierarchy, which has been chronicled in this column. But private conversations should stay private, so much as I’ve savored it, I won’t repeat their praise. But now, the Director of the Crow Collection of Asian Art in Dallas, Texas, Amy L. Hofland, has become the latest brave soul to risk the Met’s wrath by praising the book publicly on D Magazine’s Reading Room blog. She calls it an “unofficial, juicy and probably very true history…a definite must read for anyone with an interest in art and museums.” That’s worth crowing about.
“His book is hushed-up…” …but not in Germany.
Unlike many American newspapers and magazines, Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung isn’t afraid of the great and powerful trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So despite the fact that Rogues’ Gallery is not available in German translation, the paper gave it feature treatment last week in an article by Claudia Steinberg, who says that the book “reads like an adventure novel.” If you can read German, you can read the article in pdf form here.
Whose Times?
In a defense in today’s community newspaper of the potent argument that wealthy countries with wealthy, well-staffed museums should hang onto antiquities taken illegally from less powerful and less caring nations because they are better-equipped to preserve, protect, study and expose them, John Tierney undercut his argument by misrepresenting the role played in just such a case by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That this happened in the New York Times isn’t entirely surprising, granted the Sulzberger family’s conflicting roles in the two institutions, but Tierney’s Met-centric description of the Lydian Hoard affair is a perfect argument for the case made previously in Gripebox that the Times has come perilously close to operating as the Met’s publicity organ. Tierney says the Met was pressured into returning the golden treasures to Turkey from whence they came–and clearly considers that a loss to all mankind. He neglects to mention that they were crudely looted, smuggled away and sold to a knowing Met after just such things were declared totally unacceptable by the United Nations. Tierney also neglects to mention that the “pressure” was a lawsuit prosecuted by Turkey that turned on the telling detail that the Met had known the stuff was looted and so had hidden it in its basement. When that came out in discovery, the museum caved in and returned the loot. It’s a shame you wouldn’t know that from reading the museum’s family newspaper.
Campbell in the Soup, Pt.2
The still new-ish director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas Campbell, made a seemingly pointless—no exhibitions were touted, no news revealed—five minute appearance on The Colbert Report last night (caveat spectator: it starts at the sixteenth minute, after several no-skip commercials). Despite Stephen Colbert’s valiant attempts to engage the rumpled, weary-looking Brit in humor (”Ever lick a painting?”), Campbell resisted, making the segment rather pallid. But several of his remarks (”We’re in the business of showing five thousand years of what people have done,” he said of the museum he touted as “the whole world history in four city blocks”) were laughable, coming as they did from the head of an institution that claims to be dedicated to communicating history, yet goes to astonishing lengths to suppress its own. (And for those of you keeping track, the museum’s flacks have yet to back up its claim that Rogues Gallery is inaccurate. Though also not funny, that, at least, speaks volumes.)
Wintour Warming
Biographer Jerry Oppenheimer profiled the Vogue editor and Metropolitan Musem honorary trustee Anna Wintour in yesterday’s New York Post in a story pegged to her 60th Brithday and quoted me saying that though her pedestal has grown “perilously small,” Wintour remains “a looming figure in the world of image.” But Oppenheimer also claimed that I “skewer” her in Rogues’ Gallery. Is it really all that wounding to say that her effect on the museum’s image and marketing has been incalculable? Something tells me the Queen of Fashion is tough enough to take it.
Juice!
UnBeige, the design web site, calls Rogues’ Gallery a “wonderfully juicy tell-all about the Metropolitan Museum…highly recommended if you like reading about how major museums and/or rich people operate.” The book-that-must-not-be-mentioned aka the book-that-won’t-go-away also returned to the Bestseller List at Book Soup in LA this week at #9, so apparently some people do like that (the author noted gratefully).
Mehle Culpa
The Metropolitan Museum has still not come forward with a response to my request that they identify alleged misinformation in Rogues’ Gallery, but last night at a party, the legendary gossip-and-society columnist Aileen “Suzy” Mehle pointed an error out to me–so again, I’m correcting it (here and in subsequent editions of the book). On page 402, I inadvertently identified a husband of the late supermodel Dorian Leigh as Suzy’s son. In fact, Dorian Leigh married Admiral Roger W. Mehle after he and Suzy were divorced and the model became the stepmother of Roger W. Mehle Jr. “You mixed up your Roger Mehles,” Suzy said. I stand corrected.
Rogues’ Gallery LIVE at NYPL
Sometimes, things change for the better. This is one of them times. I will be speaking about Rogues’ Gallery at 5PM tomorrow (Wednesday) at the new Grand Central branch of the New York Public Library–yes, the New York Public Library. Howzabout that? It’s at 135 East 46th St. (between Third and Lex) on the second floor. There will be a special screened-off area for Metropolitan Museum staff and trustees. (Just kidding.) Annette de la Renta, Tom Campbelland Emily Rafferty will also attend. (Kidding, again. But they’re welcome to come and take up my challenge to point out any errors in what they’ve derided as a “sloppy” and “misleading” book. Seriously.)
See You On The Radio
Travel Detective Peter Greenberg’s SSI Radio show Worldwide just broadcast an interview about what Greenberg calls “the really controversial, must-read” Rogues’ Gallery. Author Michael Gross “is legendary for being the author who peels back all the layers of society and tells you what really goes on behind closed doors,” Greenberg says. Listen to it here.
Liz Smith: The Last(?) Last Word on the Last Mrs. Astor
It’s too bad Liz Smith’s column no longer appears in a New York newspaper. Her pillar in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune was a direct hit on the last nail in Brooke Astor’s coffin. “Mrs. Astor would have given up all she owned not to have had this blot on her escutcheon,” Smith says. “It’s true, Brooke disapproved of Tony [Marshall]’s wife, Charlene; still, I think she’d have moved heaven and earth to keep this sordid story out of the courts and the newspapers. Brooke indeed might have been offended had she known of accusations against her only son; but she’d never have wanted this end result. Brooke was a vivacious, flirtatious, charmer of good will and philanthropy. She was nobody’s ideal mother and didn’t much want to be. But no matter the good intentions of those who helped restore her in her final days, she’d have given that rescue up if she’d realized the ultimate consequences. This is a true tragedy all the way around.” Smith has her critics and she has been critical of Rogues’ Gallery (even referring to its focus on one central figure in the Astor tragedy–Annette de la Renta–as “beyond the pale”). But she calls it as she sees it and has the courage to say it out loud–qualities increasingly lacking in the press these days.
R.I.P. Dietrich von Bothmer
Dietrich von Bothmer, the curator emeritus of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rhodes scholar and Bronze Star recipient for bravery in the South Pacific in World War II, died on Monday at Lenox Hill Hospital. He was 91 years old and had been in failing health for some time. Bothmer was responsible for some the most controversial acqusitions in the Museum’s recent history, including the famous Hot Pot aka the Sarpedon or Eupheronios krater, the Morgantina Silver and the Lydian hoard–all of which were later returned to the countries they’d been taken from. Though those tarnished finds will no doubt be highlighted in his obituaries, they were but one aspect of a fascinating career and full life. For more on Bothmer, his life and times, see Rogues’ Gallery and a brief online biography here. He is survived by his wife, the former Joyce Blaffer, widow of Marquis Jacques de la Begassiere and daughter of a founder of Humble Oil, and their children. UPDATE (October 14): Though the news of Bothmer’s death was revealed well before yesterday’s print-newspaper deadlines, the only obituaries for him in today’s papers are paid ones–a rather striking omission, granted that back in the days when the media actually covered the Metropolitan, rather than blindly promoting its interests, Bothmer often made front-page news. But that, as they say, was then….UPDATE2 (October 15): A New York Times obituary for Bothmer has finally appeared–online only, but at least it’s been published–here. Oddly, though it discusses the affair at some length, it doesn’t mention that it was the Abe Rosenthal-era New York Times that exposed the truth about the Euphronios krater. You’d think they’d be proud of that.
“Delicious dish” delights Miss Rosen
Sara Rosen, the powerhouse downtown publishing diva, has just posted an interview with me about Rogues’ Gallery, which she deems “magnificent,” on her new blog, Miss Rosen.
The Last Word on the Last Mrs. Astor
As he has done before, David Patrick Columbia has come to some contrarian conclusions today on New York Social Diary about the close of the trial of Brooke Astor’s only child Anthony Marshall. Readers of this blog likely already know that I agree with him. “This was a household, a life, which was about the money,” Columbia writes. “It was about the money for the lady and about the money for everyone around her, including her staff, her son, naturally, and at least one of her grandsons, not to mention the Metropolitan Museum and The New York Public Library. It was about the money. It was about the money when Brooke Russell married Vincent Astor. It was about the money when the lawyer referred to it as a trial “about greed” (the lawyers’ greed, notwithstanding of course – the legal bills have now run into the millions and have crippled the Marshalls). It was always about the money. And the ultimate irony is that by the time it’s over, there will be much much much less for everyone, including every charitable institution.” For the back story on the whole mess and many of the leading players involved, there’s Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made The Metropolitan Museum.
“Enlightening…persuasive,” says The Economist’s More Intelligent Life
Art historian Avis Berman, author of Rebels on Eighth Street, reviews Rogues’ Gallery today in “Art Museum Confidential”, on The Economist’s More Intelligent Life web site. Calling the book “enlightening” and “persuasive,”, she adds, “Gross is to be congratulated for the ingenuity of his research….Gross gets it right. After 140 years in existence, the Met was due for an exposé. Yet its gravitas and gorgeous objects have ensured the museum a position that no scandal is likely to destroy.”
The Rogues of Sag Harbor
The John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor, Long Island, has hit upon a unique way to raise funds–selling tickets to dinners organized around new books chosen by the dinner hosts. For the last night of its fourth annual One for the Books dinner, October 24th, it has included Rogues’ Gallery in its gallery of choices. Buy a ticket here.
Astor Trial Ends: Guilty As Charged
A jury just found Brooke Astor’s only child, Anthony Marshall, guilty on most counts of the indictment against him for looting his mother’s estate. But the story is far from over. An appeal is likely, my sources say, and a Westchester court still has to sort out competing claims regarding the late philanthropist’s estate. So the 85-year-old Marshall’s trials are far from over. Marshall inherited his mother’s seat on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Board of Trustees but, in an unprecedented action, was kicked out of that exclusive club when his misdeeds toward his mother–now confirmed by the trial–were first revealed. UPDATE: Marshall’s lawyers say they will appeal. “Clearly, the jury thought he did something wrong,” the city’s Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum said. “I don’t think he should go to jail, frankly. He’s 85 years old. I think he’s probably suffered enough.”
PEN vs. Libel Sword
The British chapter of P.E.N. has issued a strong condemnation of that nation’s Draconian libel laws–pointing out that because of them, many important books are simply not being published there. “The real victims here are authors and readers, who are missing out on important non-fiction stories about global finance and corruption in high places as a result of these legal failings,” Jonathan Heawood, director of English PEN, tells The Bookseller.com. One London bookstore went so far as to call me, trying to fulfill customer requests for Rogues’ Gallery, which has been kept out of England for fear of libel tourism. As I can’t afford a buy-one-get-an-airplane-ticket-free plan, I had to say I couldn’t help them. As one New York newspaper editorialized not long ago, “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.”
The Weight of Public Opprobrium
With a verdict in the criminal trial of Brooke Astor’s son Anthony Marshall imminent, David Patrick Columbia’s New York Social Diary takes its latest contrarian’s look at the subject and at the unindicted yet publicly convicted co-conspirator, Marshall’s second wife, Charlene. “Whether you like to think of her that way [or] not, Brooke Astor, maybe a typical mother-in-law, was for years unkind and off-handed about her daughter-in-law,” Columbia writes. “That must have been an embarrassment (not to mention hurtful) to her son. Others are not fazed by that kind of embarrassment, as long as it’s not them. Furthermore, the players in the world of Brooke Astor are anything but angelic. And when it comes to greed and avarice, we’re now talking Derby winners. Charlene Marshall was a mere workhorse, and, mind you, regarded pretty much as that by Mrs. Astor’s circle. In other words: Not Our Kind. This kind of behavior is commonplace in that world, even ordinary. Read Edith Wharton. She never exaggerated and it remains la même chose.” The story isn’t over, Columbia concludes. You betcha. The next chapter is the battle over which of Astor’s wills will be honored, the one pitting stalwarts of New York’s cultural mafia like the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and their intertwined boards of trustees (the aforementioned players) against the already-judged-guilty-even-if-declared-innocent Marshall. Having spent years honing their legal chops in countless estate battles (see Rogues’ Gallery for the past-as-prologue, as well as portraits of some of the anything-but-angelic players), their lawyers are surely burning the midnight oil as they plan their grab for the remaining Astor millions. Let the sad and sordid games continue!
Soup’s On! (or, Revolution No. 9)
Rogues’ Gallery returns to the Book Soup (West Hollywood) bestseller list this week. A thousand thanks to the best l’il book store in Los Angeles.
Will Wonders Never Cease?
The amazing persistence of Rogues’ Gallery in the marketplace is an endless source of delight. Now, even the daily New York Times–which, as many have noted, has never deigned to notice this book about a major local cultural institution, and mysteriously cancelled a publication-week review by Janet Maslin–is paying attention. Albeit in the Home section, instead of those that cover its subject. But authors can’t be choosers in this world. Reporter Penelope Green asked me to compare the passel of interior designers gathered at a party for Elle Decor editor Margaret Russell to the city’s cultural small-m-mafia. The designers, I told her, “don’t close up the castle and pour boiling oil out the windows.”
Tom’s Foolery
Back in May, shortly after Rogues’ Gallery was published, the Metropolitan Museum’s new director, “Tapestry Tom” Campbell, addressed the subject of the book at a meeting of the museum’s board of trustees and told them, according to the minutes, “It has not received much coverage.” He spoke too soon. A summary of commentary on the book to date, including the museum’s own less-than-admiring opinion of it, is here.
You won’t read this in WWD…
…but Laura Hunt gave a great cocktail party in Dallas for Rogues’ Gallery on Wednesday night–and helloooooo.com has the photos the regular chroniclers of such fashionable events won’t dare run. The book that must-not-be-named was “embraced by Dallas,” the site says. And SFR International (it stands for Social and Financial Responsibility) covers the next day’s Rogues’ Gallery luncheon at the Adolphus Hotel. “Michael Gross knows how to weave a spellbinding tale,” says the site. “His story takes us behind the scenes of one of the greatest museums on earth [and] takes Non Fiction to new heights. His tale is so well told it moves with the pace of a great action and adventure novel. The intrigue is deep and the characters are rich with flavor. You can almost imagine yourself transported back in time, when the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and Whitneys and Morgans ruled the country like Kings and Queens.” Guests at the two events included Dee Simmons, Suzanne Palmund, Linda Ivy, Mordan, Gail Stoffel, Mary Noel Lamont, Nasher Sculpture Center director Jeremy Strick, Kimberly Chang and Yannick Mathieu, Stefano Basilico, Kim & Justin Whitman, Nancy Dedman, Nancy Lemmon, Brad Kelly, Ric Robertson, Carole & John Lee, Rita & Henry Hortenstine, Capera Ryan, Jacque Wynne, David Gravelle and Lynne & Roy Sheldon. UPDATE: The Mordan referred to above, who was also the publisher of the (now) ironically titled SFR, is a convicted criminal , now alleged to be a btrilliant swindler and has just been arrested and jailed. Talk about a rogue!
Where’s Your Beef?
In a review almost as long as Rogues’ Gallery itself, Oscar White Muscarella, a longtime curator at and gadfly within the Metropolitan Museum of Art, reports that at a May 12th, 2009 meeting of the Board of Trustees of the MMA, its new director, Thomas Campbell slammed the book as “a sardonic mixture of gossip and sloppily recounted fact that takes cheap pot shots at the Museum’s dearest and closest supporters.” The meeting minute-taker, Muscarella continues, piles on and adds that Campbell “derides the publication.” What Muscarella doesn’t say because, I am guessing, neither did Campbell to the dear trustees who’d just made him King of Museum Mountain, is what, if any, “fact” is wrong. Neither did the museum’s mouthpiece when he similarly dismissed the book as “highly misleading,” but refused to be specific. I have reported (on this page) each and every error in the book–thankfully very few–that I’ve discovered or learned about since its publication. So perhaps the museum (which refused to cooperate and actively tried, but thankfully failed, to impede my research) will take me at my word when I say that if they can demonstrate any errors of fact, I’ll be happy to correct them both here and in subsequent editions. How much you wanna bet (he added sardonically) that their beefs don’t amount to a fast food patty? UPDATE: To summarize the review, I am a dupe of “Punch” Sulzberger, Philippe de Montebello and Tom Hoving. I heard the truth from Oscar Muscarella and chose to ignore or mistate it. My thoughts: A lot of what I heard from Muscarella–and some I did not–is told at great length in his very long post. Museum watchers should be riveted–but will they link? That way lies censure. I’m always hearing that I should publish what I chose not to publish. In this case, Muscarella has done a lot of that.
(burger, above, by Claes Oldenburg)
“A compelling portrait of New York”
“Michael Gross is an acclaimed cultural journalist and an incisive, skilled, gossip-driven chronicler of the fashion and society worlds,” writes Raymond Dowd in the New York Law Journal [subscription-only]. “He is fearlessly able to breach walls of secrecy and to nail down a story where no one wants to talk. As we move through the breathless behind-the-scenes narrative, we see the Met as we now know it take shape. Battles are fought over naming galleries, restrictions on donations are ignored by the latest generation of trustees, and the new donor holding the next great treasure is courted assiduously by an institution driven with a lust for acquisition that may have no rival in human history. Rogues’ Gallery sheds light on just why the Met does not want light to shine behind the scenes. It is a compelling portrait of New York as we know it. Peopled with outsized egos, often with doctored credentials, amassing wealth and treasures in strange and sometimes criminal ways, the Met is a quintessentially New York institution.”
The Hits Just Keep on Coming
In FYIDC, its insider’s guide, Washington Life magazine called Rogues’ Gallery “the ultimate insider’s look at the colorful characters who populate New York’s Metropolitan Museum.”
Dishing in Dallas
Today’s Dallas Morning News tips its hat at Rogues’ Gallery. The paper’s entertainment and society columnist Alan Peppard calls it “a dishy read about behind-the-scenes social and civic maneuvering of the moguls who shaped the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” I’ll be speaking next Thursday, September 17th, at a literary luncheon at the Adolphus hotel in Dallas.
“Mighty enticing”
In its Labor Day issue, Hamptons Magazine calls Rogues Gallery “a fascinating look into the inner workings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” The story isn’t online, so grab a copy while you can.
If a review fell in the forest….
It was only last week that I heard that Art & Antiques magazine had reviewed Rogues’ Gallery back in July and, I was further informed, called its author (i.e. me) boorish and scornful. It took a day to find a copy, but when I did I read, to my great surprise, “Hucksters and Housekeepers,” one of the most perspicacious reviews of the book yet published. Jonathon Keats, who is apparently an artist, did indeed say I was boorish (on the subject of art, which isn’t the book’s subject, but never mind), and scornful (but of “the pettiness of rich trustees such as Jayne Wrightsman and Annette de la Renta, whose every foible has been uncovered,” not the museum), but he also looked beneath the froth and controversy to discover the beating heart of the book, the idea “that even the most exhausted repository of moribund masterpieces can be reinvigorated by a combination of new work and new ideas.” In his last paragraph, Keats accuses me of misinterperting one of the great moments of the Tom Hoving era at the Met, his exhibition of James Rosenquist’s F-111 with Emanuel Leutze’s George Washington Crossing the Delaware, Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Socrates and Nicolas Poussin’s Rape of the Sabine Women–when in fact the interpertation of that show was Hoving’s not mine, but never mind. Haters of the book (hiya–it’s not going away, is it?) may love this review–but so do I.
“Juicy and substantial”
Bill Benzon has penned a great essay on Rogues’ Gallery for The Valve, the literary web site. He calls it “a tell-much extravaganza…about the rich and powerful folks behind New York City’s Met, one of the finest art museums in the world. Stick this Rogues’ Gallery in your weekend bag or on your night stand and read it at your leisure. It won’t disappoint….With only a little more effort, however, and perhaps a little thought here and there, you can read a more substantial book, one that raises a serious question: Is the social web that created and sustained the Met about to disappear, leaving the Met with the life prospects of a beached whale? Even as he was having fun digging into the archives and tracking down skeletons in Fifth Avenue closets, Michael Gross was, in effect, rethinking the nature of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rather than thinking of it as a big solid structure that house and protects three millennia’s worth of art treasures, Gross came to present it as a fragile network of social relationships that somehow manages to balance the good, the bad, and the ugly in such a way that The Beautiful has a home…Gossip about the people who built the Met is the history of an institution told at the level of individual desires and actions. And, if gossip is a moral activity directed at maintaining social norms, then Rogue’s Gallery becomes something of an intervention directed at the institution itself.”
Rogues’ Gallery Hits the Bestseller List
Rogues’ Gallery has just debuted at #7 on the Non-Fiction Bestseller List of Book Soup in West Hollywood, California, one of the best independent book stores in America. Thanks to the Angelenos who put it there! And thanks, too, to the book-loving newspapers across the country that print its influential list.
“Incredible investigative reporting and pretty damning stuff.”
“With every page, Gross exposes intimate details…to illustrate the fascinating history of this venerable institution,” Silvana Paternostro writes in “The Making of the Met” in the new issue of Poder, the leading Latino magazine in the Americas. “He tells the stories of the men and women who form the inner sanctum of wealth and power, how those who are at the pinnacle of New York society got to be there—by maneuvering marriage and money, by hook or by crook. The book is more like two books: one is the straight gossip of the who’s who with all the antic details of tabloid journalism. The other is a serious document of social history, exhaustively researched and meticulously crafted…Even if you’ve been to the museum many times before, the stories Gross tells make you want to return immediately. The tales are so compelling that instead of trying to downplay this book, the museum should be selling it in its gift shop.”
I Love LA
And LA loves Rogues’ Gallery. Or, at the very least, the staff at Book Soup does.
Museum on Museum
The Columbus Museum of Art’s official blog has weighed in on Rogues’ Gallery. “It’s fun, gossipy, fascinating reading; the perfect museum lover’s book for summer at the beach or at home,” says Dominique H. Vasseur, the CMA’s Curator of European Art.
The audacity!
This weekend, Rogues’ Gallery got its best review yet–and its worst–each from an art critic. Writing in The Buffalo News, Jean Reeves Barre called Rogues’ “audacious” and “intriguing,” “factual” and “often irreverent,” “a honeypot of gossip” filled with “detail [that] boggles the mind.” Christopher Knight of The Los Angeles Times wasn’t quite so pleased, though he couldn’t help but admit that some bits of the book are “fun” and some of its revelations “appalling.” But given his relentlessly negative tone, you can find his review yourself if you’re so inclined.
Do the Harrimans know?
Looks like the Metropolitan Museum of Art is doing more than shrinking staff and closing stores to make up for its recession-ravaged endowment. Doyle New York, the auctioneers, just announced a September 14th sale of Asian Art from the museum. No online catalogue is yet available, but the email flyer features a model of a Japanese pagoda given to the museum by the Estate of Mrs. E. H. Harriman.
A Rave for Rogues’
Artnet.com’s Brook Mason just posted a rave review of Rogues’ Gallery, calling it “a juicy, deliciously detailed history of the nation’s largest museum and the oversized egos of those who run it….As a history of culture in this city, it’s spot on.”
“An invaluable addition to the modern history of the art world.”
“This slightly irreverent history of one of the world’s great art museums, New York’s Metropolitan, is an intriguing look behind the scenes,” says today’s Calgary Sun. Rogues’ Gallery is “an invaluable addition to the modern history of the art world.”
The fine art of back-scratching
It’s been almost eleven months since the Metropolitan Museum named Thomas Campbell, a British tapestries expert, its new director. Since then, he’s given only a few interviews, none of them particularly revealing of either his personality (shy but graceful) or his plans for the museum (spend less, update the web site). But his–or more likely, the Met’s press office–choice of outlets for those interviews says quite a bit more. The museum is only interested in publicity it can control.
Campbell’s first tentative conversations were with the New York Times, which has functioned as the Met’s in-house newsletter ever since its former chairman Arthur Ochs Sulzberger took the same title at the museum, and British newspapers. More recently, he’s spoken to two glossy magazines–both arms of Conde Nast, the famously Anglophile publishing house–Vogue and The New Yorker; at the latter, his interlocutor was a British-born writer. Considering that the Met was born from the desire of 19th Century New Yorkers to demonstrate that Americans were the equals of Europeans in things cultural, these choices send a curious message. A more practical explanation may be found in Conde Nast’s longtime financial support of the museum, funnelled through its Costume Institute, the fashion and fundraising venture behind the museum’s image-enhancing Party of the Year.
Although the Institute first merged with the museum as evidence of its desire to live up to its promise to the public that it would support education and local industrial arts, it has since been remade as the Met’s glitziest (if least substantial) crowd-pleaser. Though its annual fundraising party is said to be downsizing next year (possibly in response to criticism that it tarnishes, rather than polishes, the museum’s luster, but more likely as a result of the shrinking fortunes of the luxury brands that float the boats of fashion magazines), the museum’s continuing dependence on that source of funding is evident in its choice of stages for its new director’s ongoing dance of the seven veils–magazines guaranteed to respond with what journalists call slow wet kisses. After Campbell wipes all the lickspittle lipstick off his cheek, maybe he’ll get around to giving the American public a peek at his thoughts on the future of our greatest art museum.
This first appeared on The Huffington Post.
“Tantalizing…irresistable…one of the year’s most entertaining books,” says The Daily Beast
Nancy Bass Wyden, third-generation owner of one of New York’s finest book stores, The Strand, has posted her summer reading list on The Daily Beast, and Rogues’ Gallery tops the list. “Who doesn’t love the Met, and who wouldn’t want to read tantalizing gossip about the upper echelon of social climbers, philanthropists, and curators who have warred for prestige and control over the storied museum since its beginning?” she writes. “Completely unauthorized, this irresistible read exposes the dirty money and politics behind the Met’s rise. Plundered relics, millionaires’ meddling, and ambition disguised as social philanthropy are revealed thanks to Gross’ muckraking, producing one of the year’s most entertaining books. Take it to the beach (but not the museum).”
“Endlessly entertaining,” says Newport Seen
“Will New York ever be the same?” asks Linda Phillips on her Newport Seen web site, covering my talk about Rogues’ Gallery last week at the Redwood Athanaeum, the oldest continuously operating private library in America. “On hand were Jae French…Kimberly Skeen Jones, Nannette and George Herrick, Douglas Riggs, President of the Board, and his wife, Mary Riggs, co-chairman of the Redwood’s Events committee, Donald Tofias, and Janet Pell.”
“Don’t miss Rogues’ Gallery,” says The Atlantan
This one’s a peach. “If you thought former J. Paul Getty Museum curator Marion True’s illegally procured antiquities trial was a cause célèbre, don’t miss Rogue’s Gallery,” says The Atlantan’s Felicia Feaster. “Michael Gross’s 483-page behemoth (on the heels of his equally dishy 740 Park) recounts the prestigious museum’s often-unsavory elitism…early acquisition practices others would call looting and takes on modern-day big wigs like Met vice-chairman, socialite—and Oscar’s honey—Annette de la Renta, whom Gross paints as an avid social climber in this sustained takedown of the rich and famous.”
“This book is a museum piece,” says Page Six
Page Six in the New York Post covers my two-day visit to Newport, Rhode Island, today. My next signing and talk will be Labor Day weekend at Bookhampton in East Hampton.
Arty Party People
The Metropolitan Museum’s tight-as-a-tick relationship with Vogue Magazine will be on display next Tuesday when the magazine’s editor, Anna Wintour, and the museum president, Emily Rafferty, host what’s described as an “intimate” luncheon for Vogue’s outgoing party planner Stephanie Winston Wolkoff. Today’s Fashion Week Daily has a guest list that includes (no surprise) Oscar de la Renta, spouse of museum vice-chairman Annette de la Renta (That’s Wintour and the de la Rentas above). It’s a family affair! And unlike the Costume Institute’s Party of the Year, it’s taking place when the museum is open, so less privileged museum patrons should be able to view the human works of fashion art who are lucky enough to have been invited.
The Song Remains The Same
Those who forget the past, they say, are condemned to repeat it. So in all the wailing and rending of garments over what the current financial crisis has done to cultural institutions, it is often forgotten that their literal fortunes have waxed and waned before, and typically, the strong, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, have survived, and sometimes even learned lessons that helped them prosper anew. In “The Culture Crash” on forbes.com today, The New Criterion’s James Panero discusses how endowment managers helped exacerbate the situation–a subject that might have been usefully raised by the mainstream media before the recent staggering losses, but uncritical press coverage of museums is not my subject du jour. Instead, it’s just how bad things are, and how one cringes on reading Panero’s description of the effects of uncritical financial management on the now-somewhat-less-mighty Met:
“James R. Houghton, chairman of the Metropolitan Museum’s board of trustees, announced in February that the museum’s endowment had lost a staggering $700 million since the previous June–a decrease of 25%, leaving the endowment worth about $2.1 billion,” Panero writes. “Since investment income makes up 30% of the heavily endowed Met’s annual operating revenue, the loss shook the museum at all levels. Adding to the Metropolitan’s woes, the city announced that its operating support for the museum would be reduced by $1.7 million, with another cutback of $2.4 million announced for the next fiscal year.
“Houghton identified a set of new cost-cutting measures, including a museum-wide hiring freeze, the elimination of temporary staff and travel curtailment. He also flagged the museum’s retail arm for immediate cutbacks. In March, as the Metropolitan’s loss estimates rose by $100 million, its director, Thomas Campbell, announced further layoffs. Campbell added that the museum anticipated the need to reduce the rest of its workforce by 10% by July, which could mean a reduction of as many as 250 additional full- and part-time jobs. These cuts will represent the first museum-wide layoffs since the fiscal crisis of the early 1970s. And in June, the museum raised the estimate of its losses again, to a third of the endowment’s former value.
“‘We’re looking at a period of austerity this fiscal year, and the situation will be even more difficult in the fiscal year that follows,’ says Metropolitan spokesman Harold Holzer. Even without an additional downturn in its portfolio, the Met’s bottom line will worsen because of the way the museum averages its endowment income over a multiyear period. ‘We base [endowment income] on a rolling average of 20 quarters, so it’s just beginning to be averaged in,’ says Holzer. ‘We’ve had three quarters. Eventually the bad periods become the majority of the average. That’s when the income will go precipitously down. We’re looking at a much more pressing problem in fiscal year 2011 than in 2010.’”
Still, the Met has yet to close galleries, or close its doors altogether during part of the week, as it was forced to do in the not-so-distant past. Back in the day, the museum wisely diversified its board, opening its doors wider in order to tap new sources of funding and of wisdom, to help it make up the difference and see its new reality clearly. Would that make a difference this time? Probably. As the saying goes, no pain, no gain.
Jewels of the Giulia
Last week, I nearly crossed paths with Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic of The New York Times, who went to Rome to visit the Euphronios krater, the Greek vase famously smuggled out of Italy, sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1972, and finally returned to Italy thirty-some-odd years later following a lengthy investigation into the illegal looting of antiquities and several high-profile criminal trials. (It’s above, with me.) Even though Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger was on the museum’s board when the krater was purchased, the newspaper’s culture pages played a heroic role in the affair (a story told in depth in Rogues’ Gallery), following a long tradition of covering the museum without fear or favor, exposing the truth about the krater decades before the Metropolitan grudgingly gave it back. That was then. Now, the culture desk at the Times sounds more like an arm of the museum’s PR office. But I was still surprised to read Kimmelman’s account of his visit to Rome, which echoes the Met’s position that so-called source countries (i.e. the victims of the sort of looting long encouraged and subsidized by imperial museums like the Met) are incapable of properly appreciating or displaying such precious treasures. Kimmelman claims that no one goes to the krater’s new home, the Villa Giulia in the Borghese Gardens (”Italians didn’t seem to care much,” he writes), clearly implying, no doubt to the Met’s pleasure, that the masterpiece would be better off back in New York. In fact, as I discovered when I went to see it and other recently repatriated treasures (from the Getty Villa and the collection of Met trustee Shelby White, among others), this may be a case of sour grappa. The Villa Giulia is a treasure. And Kimmelman’s claims notwithstanding, I wasn’t alone and its compelling exhibits clearly illustrate the damage to historical knowledge done by the long history of looting at archaeological sites.
The Courtyard of the Villa Giulia in Rome
“No-holds-barred,” says the Financial Post
Canada’s Financial Post says Rogues’ Gallery is “stuffed with entertaining - and often embarrassing - detail about the Met’s administrators and donors.”
“A fine topography…Astonishing.” –The Providence Journal
In Sunday’s Providence Journal, Rick Ring, author of “Notes for Bibliophiles,” the official blog of the Providence Library special collections, calls Rogues’ Gallery “a fine topography of the major players” in the story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Excavating the Met’s history in six chapters from 1870 to 2009, Gross reveals the personalities and relationships between donors and directors, curators and dealers, and the city of New York and its cultural crown jewel,” Ring writes. “It is astonishing what people will do for money, power, and social prominence, and we see a great deal of what they will do in Rogues’ Gallery. In the end, Gross wants the Met to succeed—he is not lobbing stones at the cathedral, but rather revealing what the men and women at the pulpit have been up to behind closed doors.”
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.
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.
#1 (with an asterisk)
Rogues’ Gallery is the bestselling work of art history in the country.
Vanity Fair: Rogues’ Gallery is “explosive”
Vanity Fair’s Society & Style gives Georgette Mosbacher’s launch party for Rogues Gallery top billing over competing fetes that attracted mere movie stars and Chelsea Clinton in a post on Thursday night’s top parties. “Why?” asks VF. “Because social powerhouses have been awaiting this book with bated breath, and where better to toast it than Mosbacher’s abode, with its clear view of the Met steps?
“Talking Point: The book’s explosive allegations, and the anticipated uproar.” In attendance: former Metropolitan Museum director Tom Hoving, Jay McInerney and Anne Hearst, Gay Talese, Arianna Huffington, Samuel Peabody, Paul and Dayssi Olarte de Kanovas, Richard Feigen, Countess Sharon Sondes and Geoffrey Thomas, the decorators Ann Downey and Richard Mishaan, furniture designer and museum benefactor David Netto, Nicole Miller, Katherine Bryan, David Redden of Sothebys, the journalists Marie Brenner, Geraldine Fabrikant, Kevin Buckley, Lloyd Grove, George Gurley, Laurie Dhue, Melik Kaylan and Raymond Sokolov, power PRs Peggy Siegal, Christine Biddle, Allison Mazzola, Catherine Saxton and Harriet Weintraub, the archaeologist Iris Love, the painters Hunt Slonem and Duncan Hannah, Randy Jones, Ghislaine Maxwell, Dana Hammond, H. Woody Brock, Bettina Zilkha, Patty Raynes, Caroline Hirsch, Jonathan and Somers Farkas, Jamee and Peter Gregory, Julian and Lisa Niccolini and more. UPDATE: There are now lots of pictures on New York Social Diary.
Frieze: a “meticulous” and “entertaining romp”
Brian Sholis of Frieze calls Rogues’ Gallery “an unabashedly unofficial history…ranging from the Met’s early days as ‘a firetrap with shellacked floors and walls covered with red billiard cloth’ to the questions facing the institution today as it adjusts to a new director, Thomas P. Campbell, after being led for 30 years by Philippe de Montebello. It quickly becomes clear that Gross’s large cast of characters is not only squabbling over the institution itself; many are also jockeying for position among New York’s social elite. Gross is a meticulous storyteller, and Rogues’ Gallery is an entertaining romp.”
Room With A View
David Patrick Columbia’s New York Social Diary stopped by Georgette Mosbacher’s book launch party for Rogues’ Gallery last night, in her sprawling apartment overlooking the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There’s more on the party here.
“Proustian figures drawn by ego and propelled by imagined furies”
“Mr. Gross’ history of the mechanisms and machinations of personality that created the Met is fascinating and a lesson to all of us on many levels about the marriage of human behavior and civic responsibility,” writes a particularly poetic David Patrick Columbia, reviewing Rogues’ Gallery on New York Social Diary today. “Mr. Gross who is nothing if not perspicacious, also has a nose and a palate for the dish. We like to think of it as gossip and therefore can easily deride its legitimacy. However, much of it, especially people’s personalities, drive all history. So the story of the Met is full of this. And greed and avarice — those elements which insulate the administrators of the Art World from the rest of us students. It is a very good story and a primer on how things are done to move the machines that make the metropolis.”
Pub date cometh
Rogues Gallery is “a fascinating read,” says artinfo.com, “by turns funny, outrageous, and disconcerting — that makes public what arguably should have been public knowledge long ago. Gross’s coup is not only in the vast amounts of information he has obtained but also in his ability to tell a story about the rich and powerful people of New York nearly effortlessly and without disdain.”
Good Buzz
“Undeniably fun, Rogue’s Gallery is a hefty (over 500 pages), detailed guilty pleasure that’s hard to put down,” says the presumably pseudonymous Buzz Girl at Book Page’s Book Case blog. She adds that one of her friends who works for the museum “had the pleasure of hanging up on Gross when barraged with inappropriate questions.” Hmmm. I wonder if that was one of the several people who called me a sleaze for daring to ask about the museum without its permission? Or one of the people who talked to me anyway and won’t (or can’t) admit it?
Rogues’ Gallery: Front Page News
Rogues Gallery made the front page of today’s New York Post. Read the back story on the Metropolitan Museum’s Party of the Year here.
They report. You decide.
Two of America’s most venerable fonts of gossip, Liz Smith and George Christy, weigh in on Rogues’ Gallery today. Christy loves it in the Beverly Hills Courier, calling it “a pageturner that unravels like an elite whodunit…a captivating, tattle-tale yarn, [that] will spark a furor.” Smith, in her wowowow.com column, isn’t so sure, but agrees about the furor part, at least. She says it is a “fabulous, realistic, well-researched book,” but adds that it is “marred” by what she variously describes as a “devastating attack” on, a “diatribe” against, and “condemnation” of “pillars at the top of the City’s social strata.” “This,” Smith concludes, “is indeed going to start a firestorm of controversy.” Readers can decide for themselves next Tuesday, when Rogues’ Gallery arrives in bookstores.
Can one be at once dignified and scandalously wicked?
Jesse Kornbluth’s Headbutler.com says Rogues Gallery “begins gently, presenting a dignified, to-my-eye authoritative history of the museum….Once you get to Thomas Hoving, the showman who brought the Met into the Modern Age, the book becomes fascinating. Scandalously so, for we’re no longer dealing with New York’s sedate “Old Money” crowd. …Michael Gross wields a wicked pen; this is Dominick Dunne territory.”
“…curatorial excellence, social climbing, and skulduggery…”
The latest pre-publication review of Rogues’ Gallery is in from Booklist’s May 15th issue. “A big tell-all book about a big museum,” it says. “Art has always inspired obsession and crime, and the movers and shakers at the helm of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art couldn’t have amassed its extraordinary collections without the shenanigans of art-world rogues, be they outright thieves, clandestine swindlers, or extreme egomaniacs. Gross relishes every nefarious or audacious episode as he marches through the museum’s fascinating history of curatorial excellence, social climbing, and skulduggery. It’s a tale of elitists versus populists, of spectacular gifts and scandals, trustees refusing to consider art made by living artists and formidable innovators, especially Robert Moses and Thomas Hoving. Whether he is portraying the museum’s first director, the scoundrel Luigi Palma di Cesnola, John D. Rockefeller (the museum’s “greatest benefactor”), curator Henry Geldzahler, Diana Vreeland of the Costume Institute, or, in the most sordid chapter, vice chairman Annette de la Renta, Gross zestfully mixes factual reportage with piquantly entertaining anecdotes.”
In Style-dot-com
Style.com says that the Rogues Gallery “has all of New York talking.”
Wowowow
The Queen of Gossip, Liz Smith, had this to say yesterday on wowowow.com about Rogues’ Gallery: “This book, like all of Michael’s works, will make a lot of rich and prominent people very unhappy.” Aw, c’mon, Liz. The truth will set you free! And some of them are not as rich (or as admired) as they used be. (Hey, I’m a poet!)
Good News
“Michael Gross is about to come out with his Rogue’s Gallery,” write Rush & Molloy in today’s Daily News, “his tale of how the wealthy vie for power at the Metropolitan Museum of Art….It’s a must-read.”
Manifest Destiny
David Patrick Columbia’s New York Social Diary says Rogues’ Gallery is “destined to be a must-read amongst the cognescenti, not to mention the art world.” Fasten your seatbelts. Nineteen days to go.
Tom Tom Club
This unsolicited endorsement of Rogues’ Gallery just in: “I do not think you could have done better had the Met given you everything you asked for including a dash of honesty,” Tom Hoving says. “It is riveting and accurate. You handled me with ‘tough love’ and I understand. For a lot of things I did or engineered were failures. You were fair but rough. I appreciate that. Funny, but had I read the parts on [John D.] Rockefeller [Jr.] and [longtime New York Commissioner of Parks Robert] Moses before [Metropolitan Museum chairman Arthur] Houghton asked me to take the job, I would have turned it down. My God! The back-stabbing and Machiavellian conspiracies! I had no idea. I learned a lot about the formation of The Cloisters, which I really knew nothing about.” Hoving is a former curator of The Cloisters and Commissioner of Parks and was director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1967 to 1977. His memoir, Artful Tom, is being serialized on artnet.com.
Image of The Director by Andrew Wyeth courtesy Tom Hoving
Duel of the Directors
Today’s Page Six in the New York Post spotlights the feud between the penultimate director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philippe de Montebello, and his predecessor, Tom Hoving, in a sneak peek at Rogues’ Gallery, to be published May 5th. Order it now online.
Provoque!
The French art site artclair.com says Rogues’ Gallery will “provoque un scandale”. Ah, bon!
All Is Vanity
“Michael Gross hangs the eccentric and dazzlingly rich characters behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art in his Rogues Gallery.” –Vanity Fair May 2009
But She’s a Lady!
Another pre-publication review of Rogues’ Gallery is in: “For more than a century, the coupling of art with commerce has made New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art the world’s most glamorous whore, according to this sprawling history…..Behind-the-scenes dirt and an intriguing look at the symbiosis of culture and cash.” –Publishers Weekly, March 30, 2009
No Gripe Here
The first pre-publication review of Rogues’ Gallery is in and it’s a doozy. “The author clearly relishes dishing the dirt, but he also offers a supremely detailed history of the museum,” says Kirkus Reviews in its April 1 issue. “Gross’s portrait of Met politics is sharp and well-constructed, and readers will marvel at how the institution transcended the bickering and backhanded power plays to become one of the largest and most prestigious museums in the world. A deft rendering of the down-and-dirty politics of the art world.”
Book-Banning Stores Go Bye-bye
No one wants to see a store close–any store, especially a book store, and especially now–but there may be an element of karma in yesterday’s announcement of the closing of almost a third of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s two dozen retail stores. For the last several years, the Met’s stores have repeatedly banned books–n.b.: my recent 740 Park among them–for sins real and imagined against the museum and favored donors and benefactors. The very wealthy museum has experienced periodic contractions before (a subject dealt with at great length in my forthcoming unauthorized biography of the Met, Rogues’ Gallery, which, in the spirit of full disclosure it should be said is unlikely to be sold at the museum). And compared to those earlier times, when the museum was forced to close whole galleries, shed staff and sometimes even curtail its opening hours and shut its doors some days, yesterday’s decision was hardly Draconian. Still, Gripebox mourns for those satellite stores and fervently wishes for better times for all of us–including the marvelous Metropolitan Museum .
Rogues’ Release: The Morning After
Fashion Week Daily revealed on Friday (above) that the publication date of Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum has been advanced a week to May 5, 2009. That’s the morning after the Costume Institute’s annual gala at the museum (aka The Party of the Year and Anna’s Party) celebrating the opening of its show The Model As Muse and the same day that the big spring Impressionist and Modern Art auctions will be held at Sothebys and Christies. Kudos to all at Broadway Books, who clearly appreciate that publishing is also an art.
