Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art [Hardcover]

Danny Danziger (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 21, 2007

A unique oral portrait of the Met, drawing on interviews with everyone from the director to the security guards

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the greatest museums in the world. It is an enormous place that takes up five city blocks and has more than two million square feet of space, filled with treasures everywhere the eye can see. There are exquisite vases, jewelry, tapestry, baseball cards, Egyptian mummies, sculptures, and furniture, and many of the most famous and recognized paintings in the world, from Van Gogh to Rembrandt, Monet, and El Greco.

But this famous institution, which attracts four million visitors a year, is not just about objects. This is a place that is supported and maintained by people, which is what this wonderful book celebrates. In the fifty-two interviews in Museum, we meet some of the people who have given their lives to making the Met the success that it is. We are introduced to curators with endless knowledge who look after the collections; as well as cleaners; florists; police and security staff who maintain and secure the building; plus the philanthropists and millionaires who donate their money for new and wonderful art works, including well-known people like Henry Kravis and Annette de la Renta.

Danziger has a rare touch for getting just the right detail, and these interviews are informative, moving, and compulsively readable. Oral history at its best, Museum will appeal not only to the millions who visit the Met every year, but also to anyone with an interest in museums and art.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With full cooperation from one of the world's greatest art museums, London-based journalist Danziger (The Year 1000) interviewed over 50 individuals who attend to everything from the museum's artwork to its cleanliness, security, flowers and food. The result is a riveting, insightful and often touching group portrait of those who run New York's premier tourist attraction. Because the chapters are organized alphabetically, the story of how an aspiring opera singer became a waitress in the Trustees Dining Room is followed by the curator of European paintings describing how the museum acquired Duccio's Madonna and Child in 2005. Such juxtapositions reflect the varied mosaic of personalities that make up the Met, yet also serve an implicit purpose: to demystify and personalize the institution. Danziger's own curiosity is broad-ranging and infectious, and while the picture that emerges of the Met is overwhelmingly positive, issues such as curatorial bias, racial and ethnic diversity among the museum's visitors and the commercialization of museums are raised. This book is unique, highly enjoyable and will appeal to anyone—from the generalist to the specialist—interested in an intimate and rare view of the Metropolitan. (June 25)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a grand, inviting, and endlessly inspiring treasury of myriad forms of art from nearly every culture on earth. Resplendent in the clasp of New York City's magnificent Central Park, the Met, founded in 1870, is the second largest museum in the world, following the Louvre, and draws four million international visitors each year. Much has been written about the museum's vast holdings and rise to prominence. Now Danziger (1215: The Year of Magna Carta, 2005) captures the spirit of the living museum in a fresh and intimate oral history portraying 52 out of 2,000 full-time employees. Readers will meet a 30-year information-desk veteran; the museum's gifted florist; the librarian; ardent curators who wax eloquent about their collections, from tapestries to baseball cards to Vermeers to musical instruments; the security chief; a cleaner; a waitress; and the director. Each offers intriguing disclosures both personal and institutional, and all marvel at their good fortune. Danziger's finely crafted interviews remind us that a museum is more than its collections. Seaman, Donna
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First Edition edition (June 21, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067003861X
• ISBN-13: 978-0670038619
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,151,088 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Could have been so much better, July 9, 2008

By 

Patsy (Freeport, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Hardcover)

This book is mostly a series of condensed and edited interviews with the staff of the Metropolitan. Anyone looking to get the big picture or a great narrative like Calvin Tompkins provided in 'Merchants and Masterpieces' will be disappointed, as I was. All of the interviews provide interesting little nuggets of information, and a few are really fun to read (the best one is with the museum's director, Philippe de Montebello, who seems like a total gent) but all of them could have been trimmed back by about half. This book is mostly padding. And with so many people talking about their jobs without any sense of context, you begin to wonder what the point of this book is. It seems like a memento for people who work at the Met, not a book directed to outside readers. Maybe Danziger was going for the kind of effect that Studs Terkel gets with some of his interview books, like "Working," but Danziger, who is basically voiceless for most of the book, doesn't direct the conversations to big themes the way Terkel can. Basically, you should only read this if you are Met Museum groupie. Otherwise skip it.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars What's The Point, July 9, 2008

By 

Mark Hennelly Jr. - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Hardcover)

I must say that I'm surprised by all of the great reviews this book has been given. Its simply ok. The Met is one of my favorite places to visit and reading the description of this book I went into it thinking I would love it. I was sadly mistaken. In fact I couldn't wait to finish reading it.

The author clearly researched his topic well, interviewing countless people in each of the Mets departments but none are presented in an intriguing way. Each person that is profiled is the subject of their own little chapter but the author never goes in depth into the person's job at the Met. Take for instance the fact that we learn that the head custodian is a recovering coke addict but not what goes in to keeping such a massive institution running. We meet curators and learn of their passion for their field or for say baseball but never what goes into their daily job as a curator in the greatest museum in North America.

Really a dissapointment with very little if any redeeming qualities. The book might as well have been about an athlete and ask nothing about their sport or an astronaut and ask them nothing about NASA.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars High Art, August 11, 2007

By 

Christian Schlect (Yakima, Washington/USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Hardcover)

A collection of short statements by some of those directly connected to New York's great cultural institution. Those who have visited and enjoyed the Metropolitan Museum of Art will certainly like this book.

However, I think this book will be a pleasant and instructive reading experience for even those (such as me) who have never stepped foot in the Met. Its many understated lessons go well beyond New York and even the world of art.

One can not read it without gaining a greater appreciation for the high morale that comes from strong leadership, solid ethics, and a collective sense of mission (the current board of the Smithsonian should take note); for the enriching value of immigrants to our society; for the importance of hiring experts based on merit and knowledge;for the need for all sorts of behind the scenes workers to make a complicated organization work; and for the dignity of all jobs rightly performed.

I think Mr. Danziger's seemingly simple book deserves to endure as a minor classic.