Customer Reviews

Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

If you've read Rupert Smith's book on the British Museum and expect a similar read here, Danziger's book is not structured that way. I think a better title for this book is "Indulgent Interviews with the passionate people behind the scenes at the Metropolitan Museum" where each interview (presented as a monologue) is basically 30% (or more!) the life history of the interviewee and the balance being their present lives attached to the Museum. I haven't been to either museum but received a much better picture of the British Museum from Smith. However, these are quite different books since Danziger's book is all text with no accompanying photographs whereas Smith's book presents useful photographs to accompany the story of the museum with its different departments and curators (and other museum personnel) and objects that they love. I would say that about 30% of the content in Danziger's book is not directly relevant to the behind-the-scenes aspect of the Metropolitan Museum but does generally go into their passion with art.

What a rich, generous, amazing book! Perhaps fifty different people from curators through trustees, security people, and cleaning staff show us how they all work together to make one of the greatest museums in the world. From the extremely wealthy trustee to the waitress with aching feet, it shows the human faces behind the priceless art in New York's Metropolitan Museum. We know about the life of Van Gogh; now we can learn about the people who serve the place which keeps his work safe for the world to see. To the author: thank you so much!

These are interviews of the people who have helped make the Met the greatest museum in the world. They range from the director to the security guard to the cleaner along with the multimillionaire benefactors. The perfect gift for the art critic and art lover.

This is fabulous book, but then again there's a chapter about

me, so perhaps you should ask someone else.

I have read the other reviews, and there is merit in the charges that this book does ramble on a bit. Yet for my purposes, I love it. I'm a career counselor specializing in clients who wish to work in the arts. Here is a great resource for such people. How did these people get their jobs? For the most part, they knew someone. A buddy from the service, a floral designer, a fellow enthusiast. That's the way job-hunting goes. You should have a productive network, you should be enthusiastic, you should be well-grounded in something specific.

Parents, take your kids to museums even if you don't know much about them yourself. Allow them to collect things they are passionate about. Encourage them to meet others who share their interests. You might be raising a future curator, librarian, or retail manager.

Each chapter is an interview with someone connected to the museum, from trustees and curators to janitors and waiters. I mostly wanted to read the curators' statements, and to see how they came to work at the Met and what they think of their jobs. Wishful thinking on my part that one day, maybe, I could have a job like that. And some of them do talk about themselves. But others only want to talk about the art, which is actually more interesting to read, at least for me, because you get a better sense of their geeky love of the subject rather than their self-importance. Not that the chapter about the greeter sounds self-important. But the trustee, for instance, talked about his rich father and his travels and his seven houses and that's all well and good, but what do you think about the museum? Why are you a trustee? What's your mission for the Met and how do you see it as a place of cultural education?

It isn't a book that tackles the issues, though. It doesn't challenge the idea of the Met as a giant, old-style encyclopedic museum. The author/interviewer, in the preface, reveals a somewhat starry-eyed, idolizing regard for the place and its keepers. He writes that every employee he interviewed loved their job and had no complaints, for instance (he must not have talked to Oscar Muscarella). And I'm sure the museum appreciated this entire book of good press, and guided him to the right people accordingly. Still, it's a useful read to get into the mindset of the people in charge of operations, especially those who have been with the Met for a long time and can describe the changes it's gone through: the creation of the Islamic art collection, the evolution of the American wing, etc.

There's also a common thread among most of the curator interviews, wherein they highlight a couple of their favorite pieces in their collection and say, these aren't the pieces most people come to see, but we have to balance the entertainment and popularity quotient with the need to introduce visitors to works of art they haven't heard of before. This is an important point. Especially at a museum like the Met, which is such a tourist attraction, there is a need to keep a certain level of sophistication and variety within the collections so as not to let it degenerate into a greatest-hits-of-art-history kind of showplace.

The book is fascinating, presenting the views of the staff at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from the security to the curatorial departments. The book shows how each individual is important and helps the museum in their own way.The book arrived on time in the condition described by the seller.