New Met director Max Hollein must resolve contemporary art conundrum
Hollein must balance showing contemporary art with the Metropolitan Museum’s other core commitments, especially with critics questioning the necessity of a planned US$600 million wing dedicated to the period
When Max Hollein, the newly appointed director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, first sits down in his Fifth Avenue office this summer, he will have thousands of problems to address.
The Met is America’s greatest museum, after all: it has a collection of nearly two million objects, a budget of US$305 million, a staff of 2,200 and attracts seven million visitors a year . It has also endured a turbulent few years.
But Hollein, 48, who will be just the 10th director at the Met in 148 years, will have two first-order issues to confront. First: how much energy should the Met put into modern and contemporary art? And second: Can I work with this guy?
“This guy” is Daniel Weiss, the Met’s president and chief executive. He has been running the Met since the surprise resignation last year of Englishman Thomas Campbell after eight years in the job. When Hollein joins the Met he will split responsibility for running the institution with Weiss in a new power-sharing arrangement which may prove difficult to manage.
Former director of the Met on his acrimonious departure from the venerable New York museum
Similar arrangements have proved dysfunctional at the Getty and the Guggenheim, two other large US art museums, leading to premature departures by high-profile directors who felt their leadership was being interfered with or undermined.