Few events have been awaited with more trepidation in the world of culture—we were going to say “the art world,” but it embraces much more than that—than the appointment of the next director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Philippe de Montebello, who will leave the museum at the end of December after a thirty-year tenure, is not just a hard act to follow. Mr. de Montebello has been a unique moral and aesthetic force in a museum world besotted by the meretricious glitter of a preposterously overvalued and trash-addicted art market. We have often expressed our admiration of Mr. de Montebello’s stewardship at the Met, his expert negotiation of those perilous waters where commerce, snobbery, and aesthetic fraudulence swirl in uneasy combustion with the imperatives of aesthetic achievement. At the Met, he conceded as little as practically possible to the clamorings of the merely trendy. He nonetheless presided over an institu ...