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Notes & CommentsOctober 2008 An inspired choice at the Met On the newly announced successor to Philippe de Montebello. 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 ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 27 October 2008, on page 2 Copyright © 2008 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/An-inspired-choice-at-the-Met-3906
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