Armavirumque, Nov 01, 2006 10:59 AM

Peter Gelb watch

by James Panero

When Peter Gelb took over as director of the Metropolitan Opera from Joe Volpe, the question wasn’t whether he’d botch things up, but how long it would take him to undermine Volpe’s up-from-the-streets class act with parlor tricks and cheap P.R. Gelb, after all, has built his reputation on media stunts (The son of Arthur Gelb, long-time Managing Editor of The New York Times, Peter was practically reared in the lap of The Gray Lady).

Here is how Peter Gelb introduces himself in the season’s Playbill:

Having produced Vladimir Horowitz in Moscow during the Cold War, the Boston Symphony in China at the end of the Cultural Revolution, Julie Taymor’s Oedipus Rex in the Japanese Alps, the Met’s Ring cycle on global television, and Jessye Norman and Kathleen Battle together in concert at Carnegie Hall, I have earned by producer stripes.

Gosh--give this guy the Christo medal for public displays of global self affection. But just to be sure you know how great the Met will be under a director "promising change...as an art form that’s aging, opera today needs additional bolstering," Gelb has hired the blue-chip PR agency Rubinstein & Associates to sing his praises. One of Rubinstein’s orders of business was to promote the Met’s new art gallery, which armavirumque was the first to report on here.

It’s always worse than you think, isn’t it? After attending the Met’s beautiful performance of Madame Butterfly, which originated in London, I took a walk around Gelb’s new gallery space, just off the Met lobby. Here, tears of sadness at Puccini’s story line were replaced by tears of anguish over Gelb’s turgid repackaging of great art. Particularly stupid, and still on display at the new ’Arnold and Marie Schwartz Gallery Met,’ is a work by Chelsea darling Richard Prince. The work in question reinterprets Madame Butterfly as, yes, a lesbian, and features clippings from pornographic magazines. Prince writes of the work in the Playbill: "I fell bad that she got involved with Pinkerton. She should have been in love with another woman." Oh, ho hum. Now there’s an idea perfectly suitable for a press release, and perfectly worthless for interpreting a masterpiece.

It may be appropriate that David Henry Hwang thought up a similar idea nearly two decades ago--because every stunt in Gelb’s repertoire is about twenty years out of date, right down to the 80s art stars like David Salle he’s collected for ’Gallery Met.’ Finally, Gelb thinks he can sex up the met by attracting Hollywood b-list celebrities like Liv Tyler for opening night. Let me be the first to say that I attend the Met in order to avoid vacuous people, and I’ll bet there’s not a serious opera lover who feels differently. Here is what Alex Ross had to say about it:

The consequences of Gelb’s future plans--he has announced collaborations with new directors, several commissions of new operas, ventures into music theatre won’t be known until 2009 or 2010. There are reasons to be skeptical. Celebrity worship will get the Met only so far; people aren’t going to pay premium prices to sit near Jude Law, stimulating as that experience may be.