Wholly Hollein’s: The Metropolitan Museum’s Director to Add CEO to His Title

Daniel Weiss has just resigned himself to lame-ducksmanship, almost a year before he will officially step down from his position as CEO and President of the Metropolitan Museum. This interim period will give the Met a chance to get its administrative act together, but it may diminish Dan’s clout and effectiveness at a time when the Met faces challenges on many fronts.

We already knew that Met director Max Hollein isn’t fond of playing second fiddle. As he previously did at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, he will add CEO to his director’s title effective next July 1, when Weiss leaves. For better or worse, this would return the Met to the Philippe de Montebello model, wherein an art-savvy curatorial leader with impressive administrative creds steers the ship. But with no plan yet in place for delegating day-to-day oversight of finances, capital projects and legal matters to a highly experienced second-in-command, Max may be underestimating what is required to manage what is arguably the world’s preeminent (and vexingly complicated) encyclopedic museum.

According to the Met’s announcement:

The Board unanimously passed a resolution, based on the work of a subcommittee, that concluded that, during his four-year tenure as director, Hollein has proven himself to be a creative, energetic and inspired leader of the museum, and was the clear choice to serve as the next CEO. The subcommittee noted the strong partnership that Hollein and Weiss have forged, navigating together through the unprecedented challenges of recent years; the impact of the programming Hollein has brought to the museum; and his standing as a leader in the cultural field [emphasis added].

“His standing” here—touting the Met’s current show of colorized, reimagined antiquities—to me seems a little shaky:

I foresaw the newly announced administrative shift in April 2018, when Max was chosen to assume the Met’s directorship—a post that Weiss had occupied, along with the presidency and the CEO post. Here’s what I then wrote:

I see him [Max] as a strong, confident leader (as is Weiss). While they will try to govern by consensus, I shudder to think what may happen if an irresistible force meets in immovable object on some important issue. Perhaps after a trial period, the organizational chart will be restored to the proper hierarchy, in conformance with professional guidelines [p. 5] for art museum directors. The last time the Met had a president as the director’s (Philippe de Montebello‘s) superior, it went badly and was abandoned.

A better model would be having the director as CEO and the president as COO. If that doesn’t happen while Weiss, 60, is at the Met, it almost certainly will after he leaves, assuming that Hollein, 48, is in it for the long haul.

What we don’t know yet: Will an impressively qualified president be named to serve as the Met’s COO? Without that, Hollein will likely find that there’s too much on his plate. As I wrote here, Weiss will be leaving “at a time when many (perhaps too many?) ambitious and costly capital projects are still pending—the thorough reenvisioning of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing (which houses the Museum’s collections of art from sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania, and the ancient Americas); the renovation of the Ancient Near Eastern and Cypriot Art Galleries; and the sweeping renovation of the Modern Wing (to be named for lead donor Oscar Tang).”

When asked by me whether a president was being sought and, if so, what that person’s responsibilities may be, a Met spokesperson would only say this: “The Board will next decide what the structure will be, including what roles will be created.” We can only hope that they’re actually further along in this crucial thought process than this vague statement seems to suggest.

Even a consummate museum leader like Philippe (who had a model president in Emily Rafferty) might have been daunted by the prospect of juggling so many major projects at the same time (not to mention maintaining a robust exhibition program). Here ‘s what de Montebello said about his workload during a round-table discussion among six major museum directors (as quoted on p. 200 in Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust, 2004, edited by James Cuno):

What we have to do as an institution to attract and keep them [visitors] causes me to turn all sorts of wheels I never had to turn before. The cost of all of this is very high. We have added large numbers of people to the administration, visitor services, development, membership….The burden of maintaining this enormous machine is crushing.

Still, the answer to the question in my editors’ headline for my 1978 ARTnews profile of the then incoming Met director is (and was then) a resounding “Yes”:

I’ve already felt let down by some missteps at the Met on Hollein’s watch: A president with deep knowledge of American museum practices and a commitment to upholding the Met’s highest curatorial standards might have exerted some push-back against the insertion in the Met’s Greek and Roman galleries of garish “reconstructions” of what ancient statues supposedly looked like before their hues had faded (as seen in the current “Chroma” exhibition). Too much curatorial latitude was accorded to Vinzenz Brinkmann, whom Hollein had overseen when he directed the Liebieghaus Sculpture Collection, Frankfurt. Even the Met’s own veteran curator in charge of Greek and Roman art had acknowledged to me that he found the Brinkmann colorizations “jarring.”

Misgivings should also be expressed about allowing a private collector’s personal art expert—Emily Braun, Leonard Lauder‘s curator since 1987—to organize a show of Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition (opening Oct. 20), with some 10 percent of the works coming from the promised collection of Braun’s boss. Lauder in 2013 announced his plan to make “a truly transformational gift” to the Met of some 78 works, including 33 by Picasso, 17 by Braque, 14 by Gris, and 14 by Léger. That gift was accompanied by the establishment of a new Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, which he bankrolled. These benefactions are undeniably breathtaking. Nevertheless, a Met curator, not a collector-employed guest curator, should rightly take charge of the upcoming Met show, in consultation with Braun.

Weiss brought to the table another strong skill in which Hollein is less adept—a facile command of the English language. As watchers of my CultureGrrl Videos may have discerned, Hollein’s thick Austrian accent can interfere with listeners’ comprehension in the large, reverberant halls where he sometimes holds forth. Some of his utterances are wince-worthy, as when he pronounced “Mayan” as “MAY-un,” instead of MY-un (on two separate occasions).

While praiseworthy in theory, Hollein’s predilection for shows that highlight cross-cultural affinities—such as African Origin of Civilization and Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast—have been stronger in concept than in scholarship (as I discussed here and here).

That said, I still think that Hollein (like de Montebello) can “make it at the Met,” but only with the support and guidance of a highly knowledgeable, experienced president, who, like Weiss, can make up for some of the gaps in Max’s undeniably impressive background. We need to know whether, how and with whom this constructive partnership can be forged.

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