On Wednesday, 31 May, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York gave its annual spring press breakfast, which discusses the museum’s upcoming exhibitions and gives updates on the institution’s news. This year, it served an additional purpose: it was the last press conference given by Tom Campbell, who will step down as the museum’s director in June.
Campbell took the opportunity to emphasise the museum’s key achievements and developments during his eight-year mandate—while adroitly alluding to the museum’s recent struggles. These include a potential $40m budget deficit and dissatisfaction among the curatorial staff over pay cuts and reductions in programming. “The Met is, of course, in a period of transition,” Campbell said early in his speech. He also added: “I want to make it clear to everyone in the room that I’m proud of what we accomplished.”
He defended such positions as the museum’s rapidly increased attention to Modern and contemporary art (a “clear mandate by the board”), later mentioning the museum’s star gift of the Leonard A. Lauder Collection of Cubist art. He pointed to other major gifts, such as the David H. Koch Plaza in front of the museum, which opened in 2014, and renovation projects at the museum, such as the overhaul of the American Wing in 2012, the new Costume Institute galleries in 2014 and the reopening of the museum’s 15 galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia in 2011.
Campbell also pointed to the museum’s increase of attendance (up 40%) during his mandate. The museum hit a record in 2016, with more than seven million visitors, which makes it number two in the list of the world’s most visited museums, according to The Art Newspaper’s 2016 visitor figures report.
Along these lines, Campbell discussed the importance of making the museum more accessible and shedding its perception as austere. “We didn’t dumb down to find a larger audience—we made them realise they want to find us,” he said. Part of the goal of accessibility has been increasing the museum’s online presence, and he mentioned digital initiatives such as the Met’s announcement last year that it would made 375,000 images of works from its collection available for download and free use. The Met has the largest online audience of any museum in the world, Campbell added.
(This museum’s digital department, ironically, played a part in Campbell’s departure, according to The New York Times.)
“The Met has an exhibition programme that’s the envy of the world,” Campbell said. His speech was followed by remarks from the museum’s associate director for exhibitions, Quincy Houghton, on the museum’s upcoming programme for 2017-18, including an a major show of 18th-century Spanish colonial painting, Painted in Mexico, 1700-90: Pinxit Mexici. Curators gave sneak peeks of other upcoming shows.
Sheena Wagstaff, the Met’s chairman of Modern and contemporary art, discussed a thematic show, Delirious: Art and the Limits of Reason, 1950-80 at the Met Breuer, an “alternative evaluation of Post-war art” that involves “calculated absurdity”, among other exhibitions; Ian Alteveer, the associate curator in the department of Modern and contemporary art discussed the David Hockney show (27 November-25 February), which is travelling from London; and Carmen Bambach, curator of the department of drawings and prints, discussed the major upcoming show on the Old Master painter and sculptor Michelangelo she has organised, Divine Draftsman and Designer (13 November 2017-25 February 2018). It has been in the planning since 2008, when the museum began negotiating loans, she said—the year Campbell was announced as the Met’s future director.