NYU Professor Philippe de Montebello, left; Mariët Westermann, provost, NYU Abu Dhabi, at podium
Edited photo: Max Anderson’s TwitPic page
NYU Abu Dhabi, which is inaugurating its academic course offerings this September, is emphasizing its connections to the museum world with a two-day conference, yesterday and today, on Art Museums Here and Now. Capitalizing on NYU Professor Philippe de Montebello‘s cachet, the conference has a line-up that includes such leading museum directors as: Neil MacGregor, British Museum; Mikhail Piotrovsky, State Hermitage Museum; Max Anderson, Indianapolis Museum; Emilie Gordenker, The Mauritshuis. Videos of the proceedings may later be available here.
Philippe moderated yesterday’s kick-off discussion,”The Birth and Transformation of Museums.” His own announced topic was: “The Metropolitan Museum of Art—A Case of Parthenogenesis.” Does that have something to do with the birth of the Parthenon, we non-scientists wonder? I urgently consulted the “p” words on p. 614 of my dictionary: “reproduction by development of an unfertilized gamete that occurs esp. among lower plants and invertebrate animals.”
Is he referring to the curators or trustees?
A Rafael Viñoly-designed NYU campus on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island, future home of four new museums, is expected to open in 2014. But I couldn’t figure out from NYU Abu Dhabi’s website where this fall’s classes will be housed.
Then again, my investigative reporting skills have, at this writing, turned to mush. I’ve been working too feverishly on a mainstream-media project, and I’m starting to feel like one of those “unfertilized gametes” (“a mature germ cell possessing a haploid [in my case, hapless] chromosome set and capable of initiating formation of a new indiviual by fusion with another gamete”).