I spent most of my afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art today. My main reason for going (besides that fact that it's cheap, warm and beautiful), was to see the current Philippe de Montebello exhibit; he's a renowned curator for the Met and the museum's current director. In thirty-one years, he has acquired over 80 thousand pieces for the museum. The exhibit puts together around 300 of those pieces. What's wonderful about it is that, other than appearing pleasing in their placement next to each other, the piece have no relationship to each other, what so ever.
Only in a few spots of the exhibit is there something that could be called a “theme,” with much of the start of it taken up by sketches and etchings, but for the most part 2nd century busts stand unapologetically beside 19th century oil paintings. Eclectic doesn't even begin to describe the variety in this exhibit; it's almost like The Breakfast Club took the form of an art exhibit. Things are arranged kind of how I imagine a personal collector might arrange art in their home. I guess that's how we're being asked to look at and appreciate the work of de Montebello; he could have easily been a personal collector, but he's shared his gifted knack of collection and his collector's eye with the museum and all of its visitors. It also makes the exhibit that much more personal; I felt like I was walking through the aesthetic section of de Montebello's mind. I don't even know the guy, so I have no way of verifying whether his acquisitions reflect his personal taste but hidden among the vast display, I found one small photo of him, de Montebello himself, taken in front of the Temple of Dendur in the Egyptian gallery. It seemed to reflect a sort of unassuming cheekiness, the exact personality I think would be drawn to all the items on display.
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