Metropolitan Museum’s New Art-less Education Center

What’s wrong with this picture?

The same thing that’s wrong with this picture…

…and this picture:

Aside from being blurry, what’s amiss in these amateur shots, which I took at a recent press preview, is the coldly institutional impression created by the cavernous, uninviting spaces of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Uris Center for Education. Its halls, designed by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, are devoid of art or anything of enlivening visual interest. The objects displayed in the vitrines, such as the one in the photograph directly above, are posters, books and other educational materials, not objects or images likely to engage the imagination or capture the interest of the many schoolchildren who will trudge through that long, charmless corridor. This is a place that puts teaching kits, not sculptures, on pedestals.
The lobby space that you see in the top photograph formerly contained a model of the Parthenon to arrest one’s visual attention. Now you can gaze upon wall projections with information about what’s upstairs.
I hate being churlish about this. Any project that provides more spacious and up-to-date facilities for a library, study centers and a studio is, by definition, a good thing. But now that the shell is up, the Met should give more thought to how to fill it. Previous incarnations of the education center had included displays specifically intended to engage and enlighten the hoards of captive audiences brought there on school trips. Kent Lydecker, the museum’s associate director for education, said that there were no current plans for such displays at the new Uris Center, but they remained a possibility.
Of course, the main action is, as it should be, in the upstairs galleries. When I read the press materials, in advance of my visit, I anticipated that the most exciting aspect of the new center might be the “the museum’s first-ever art study room designed for teaching with original works of art.” Lydecker told me that the unique value of this space was that works from different departments of the museums could be brought together there for comparative study.
So, on opening day of the center last Tuesday, I eagerly attended the lecture by European paintings curator Maryan Ainsworth and paintings conservator Michael Gallagher, who described their roles and discoveries in the recent acquisition of a Cranach, brought down from the old master galleries for the occasion.
There it sat on an easel, unlit and off to the side, while the lecturers focused for almost the entire hour on projected images:

Finally, at the end, the painting was rolled out and unevenly lit. But it turned out that the display of the original painting was just an excuse to show off some new technology: A camera continously panned over it, projecting enlarged details on the screen behind it, which dithered distractingly and were even blurrier than my photographs.
The most engaging and spontaneous art experience that I had at the center was provided by the obviously delighted Harold Holzer, the Met’s senior vice president for external affairs (below), whose portrait was probably the first artwork completed in the new center’s studio. It was drawn by a celebrity present for the ribbon cutting, known to the artworld as Anthony Benedetto, but to the music world as Tony Bennett.

Harold Holzer with His New Acquisition