Perhaps because the job of managing museums has been complicated by the complexities of “woke-ness,” there’s recently been a head-spinning turnover in the Director’s Office, with DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) as an overriding imperative. Max Hollein, the straight white male who in 2018 assumed the directorship of the Metropolitan Museum, got in just under the wire before suggested diversity considerations in hiring hardened into near-stipulations.
That said, I had correctly predicted that Hollein and Daniel Weiss, the Met’s (now departed) president and CEO, might not have been a match made in heaven.
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
I had characterized Dan as the Met’s “remedial leader,” hired, in part, to address deficiencies linked to the managerial shortcomings of former Met director Tom Campbell, who had left the museum in financial disarray. Knocked off his pedestal at the Met, Campbell agilely regained his footing in California, where he now directs the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Weiss, with the administrative know-how of a college president and the academic creds of an art historian, became the Met’s president in 2015 and its CEO in 2017, assuming those posts before Max arrived.
With all the managerial maneuvering, the Met still hadn’t managed to achieve its stated goal of a balanced budget as of the end of the most recent fiscal year, according to the accounting in its Annual Reports: It ran a financial deficit of $3.9 million in fiscal year 2023 (ended June 30), compared to shortfalls of $5.6 million in fiscal 2022 and $7.6 million in fiscal 2021. As CultureGrrl readers may remember, a Met spokesperson had told me in 2022: “We expect to achieve a balanced budget for FY 22, which just ended.” As the above figures show, that didn’t happen then, nor in the following year. (Hope springs eternal.)
But please don’t get me started (at least not yet) on Max’s seemingly over-optimistic determination to remake (at great expense) large swaths of the Met’s physical plant, supplanting the capital plans of his predecessors. In a detailed breakdown for the NY Times last October, veteran art journalist Ted Loos quantified the mind-boggling (budget-busting?) capital costs of Max’s expansionist extravagances:
Six large projects that began in 2015, many of which are still underway, are budgeted at a total of $2 billion [!?!]. But that will likely not be the end of it.
What Loos doesn’t tell us is how all this construction will be funded. Can a museum director who lacks long, strong ties to this country’s philanthropic cultural community (as were adroitly forged by Campbell’s illustrious predecessor, Philippe de Montebello) manage to raise such enormous sums for these New York edifices? If Max builds it, will they fund?
But for now, let’s get back to basics—rejiggering the Met’s management structure.
Assuming some of the director’s customary roles, Weiss had outranked Hollein on the organization chart (as I noted here), running counter to the guidelines of the leading professional organization for American art museums—the Association of Art Museum Directors. In his prior gigs, Max was accustomed to running the show. When he became director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (before trading places with Campbell), he wrested the CEO title from Diane (“Dede”) Wilsey, who was relegated to the position of board chair (and is now chair emerita). So it was no surprise that when Weiss decamped, Hollein assumed the Met’s “CEO” title.
That revision in the pecking-order put the Met back in sync with the guidelines in Professional Practices in Art Museums (2011 edition, revised in 2023), which states this (p. 5):
The board should appoint the director—to whom it delegates responsibility for day-to-day operations—to be the chief executive officer [emphasis added] of the museum….In certain cases, a paid president or equivalent administrative post may also be appointed….A clear definition of the responsibilities of each position is essential, and the director should carry the ultimate responsibility for advancing the institution’s mission, including its artistic direction, collections, scholarship, and programs.
Shortly before Max arrived at the Met, I had predicted that he would “undoubtedly try to make their unorthodox partnership [his relationship with Weiss] work.” But anticipating a future readjustment, I had stated that “Max’s own power grab when he assumed his too-short directorship of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco demonstrates that he (rightly) believes that the CEO title belongs with the director.”
As I noted in my Weiss Flight post, analyzing Dan’s departure from the Met: “It’s a tough time to be a museum leader.”
Such complications have helped to make this a time of major leadership transitions, as reported last June by Robin Pogrebin in her NY Times piece on “the new generation of museum directors.” Robin cited seven museums that had recently named new directors, with another, the Guggenheim, having recently named Mariët Westermann to succeed its already departed head, Richard Armstrong. Westermann, who was not on Pogrebin’s list of “names widely believed to be in contention to lead the Guggenheim,” probably owed her selection, in part, to her experience in Abu Dhabi, where the Guggenheim still hopes to open its long-delayed offshoot (said by Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism to be “on track for 2025 completion”). Since 2019, Westermann has served as Vice Chancellor, Chief Executive, and Professor of Arts and Humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi.
CultureGrrl readers met Mariët in 2012, when she was vice president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: She was the first speaker (after an introduction by the moderator, Max Anderson, then director of the Dallas Museum of Art) at a New York panel discussion on art-museum funding, excerpted in my CultureGrrl Video at the end of this post.
You can watch it here:
In addition to the turnover at the Guggenheim, Philadelphia Museum, Whitney Museum, LAMOCA, SFMOMA, Baltimore Museum, and American Museum of Natural History, Robin mentioned that “the contract of Glenn Lowry, the longtime director of MoMA, expires in 2025.” As CultureGrrl readers may remember (from my December 2007 post—Elderfield Too Elderly? MoMA’s Mandatory Retirement Beckons), MoMA had a 65-and-out policy for staffers (which I correctly suspected might be waived for Lowry, if he so desired). Lowry is now 69.
But the luminary whose departure I most rue is one of the most knowledgeable and accomplished (yet self-effacing) museum directors I’ve known during my 50 years covering museums: Ian Wardropper has announced that he will be retiring in 2025 from what will be a distinguished 14-year directorship of New York’s Frick Collection, itself currently in the midst of a major renovation project.
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
Ian had pleasantly surprised me years ago by going out of his way after a press event at the Met (where he was then chairman of the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts), in order to thank me for defending him in this favorable 2009 CultureGrrl review of a Met show that the NY Times had (to my mind) shockingly panned. That unexpected, unnecessary courtesy—an outlier in my formal interactions with museum officials—has stuck with me ever since.
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