folly . . . A costly undertaking having an absurd or ruinous outcome.
—The American Heritage Dictionary
Of the many questions to be raised about the new Lila Acheson Wallace Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, surely the most fundamental is: Who needs it? To which question we have yet to be given a cogent or credible reply. Here are twenty-two galleries, some of them very large and none of them very beautiful, which have been built at great expense to house an immense permanent collection of twentieth-century art. Yet the Met, as everyone knows, does not have even the shadow of a twentieth-century collection of the size and substance which this elephantine facility calls for, and the likelihood of the museum ever acquiring such a comprehensive collection is exceedingly remote.
Moreover, the need for such an outsize public collection in a city already extremely rich in twentieth-century museum holdings of great range and quality is by no means self-evident. What, even in the best-case scenario, is to be expected from this costly effort? We know for a fact that in certain key areas of twentieth-century art—Cubist painting and sculpture, for example, and the work of such modern masters as Kandinsky, Mondrian, Matisse, and Miró—the Met stands no chance of equaling what our other New York museums already have in place. The same is probably true for the history of Constructivism, Dada, and Surrealism (though there is no shortage of work representing the dregs of
