Former director of the Met on his acrimonious departure from the venerable New York museum
Visiting Hong Kong in his final days as head of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas Campbell sheds light on challenges facing museums in the digital era, and how his tenure came to an acrimonious end
Thomas Campbell spent two days of his last week as director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in Hong Kong, at last month’s 2017 Museum Summit, where he delivered a speech with a title so prosaic, it might have been specifically designed to blanket the explosive circumstances surrounding his recent resignation.
However, “Finding a Balance Between Analogue and Digital in the Museum Experience” was no yawning matter, especially for the international curators and museum directors sitting in the polite audience inside the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. They had all witnessed invasions by the smartphone-and-Instagram brigade into their hushed galleries.
They would also have been well aware that the Briton had been accused of going overboard with digital development at the Met, as the New York museum is fondly called. And they would have known about the litany of misdeeds that he was accused of – profligacy, over-ambition, the ruining of staff morale and a close relationship with a female member of the digital team that led to tongues wagging and charges of favouritism – before he abruptly quit one of the most powerful jobs in the cultural world, on February 28.
His detractors spoke their minds in a series of articles. Among the most damaging was a February 4 New York Times piece reporting that curators and trustees had “zeroed in” on Campbell for putting the museum in a poor financial position. George Goldner, chairman of the museum’s drawings and prints department for 21 years, said damningly: “It’s a tragedy to see a great institution in decline.”
Campbell resigned three weeks later, eight years after having become director at the relatively young age of 46.
Such public airing of grievances in the scholarly milieu of museums is as rare as the medieval exhibits that “Tapestry Tom” Campbell tended when he joined the Met as a curator, in 1996. Museum directors used to stay in the job for life – the previous director, Philippe de Montebello, was in the seat from 1977 to 2008.