It’s a little sad that the board of trustees at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art has felt obliged to drop the term “director” in
naming Philippe de Montebello as the museum’s new chief executive,
but the decision itself is an excellent one. In the two decades that
Mr. de Montebello has been in charge of the museum’s artistic
affairs, he has not only rescued our greatest museum from the
extravagant follies and intellectual demoralization caused by the
reckless tenure of his immediate predecessor, but he has also restored
the institution to a position of leadership in the cultural life of
the nation. His achievement is all the more remarkable when we
compare it to the
woeful
decline in standards that has overtaken so
many other art museums—and not only in New York, of course—in the
same period.

It was the Met board itself that, some twenty years ago, demoted the
office of the director to second-class status by installing a paid
president as the museum’s chief executive officer. This introduced
a division of labor—and, what is more important, a division of
authority—that was bound to cause more problems than it solved. It
was never exactly a secret, moreover, that the board’s decision to
effect that division of authority was a direct consequence of its
own failure to rein in the excesses of Mr. de Montebello’s
predecessor. The board, rather than acknowledge the role that its own failure
in museum governance contributed to the Met’s mounting problems,
covered its embarrassment by announcing a change in
administrative structure that was claimed to be more “democratic”
than the traditional directorship. This was nothing but face-saving
humbug at the time, and it has now
—at last—been acknowledged to
have been humbug by the new board’s decision to restore full
authority to what is in everything but name the traditional office
of the director, who, in another face-saving stratagem by the
board, will now be called the museum’s chief executive officer.
Exactly who is expected to be fooled by this publicity
device is anyone’s guess.

What made the Met’s decision to demote
the office of the
director especially unfortunate at the time was that it lent the
museum’s prestige to a larger, ill-fated trend that saw book publishing
houses placed in the hands of executives who knew nothing about
books, universities appointing presidents who knew nothing about
scholarship or learning, opera companies handed over to bureaucrats
who knew nothing about music, and so on and on throughout our major
institutions of cultural life. We’ve lived with this phenomenon
long enough now to assess its cultural costs, which have been
enormous. If the programs in our art museums have come more and
more to resemble the vulgarities of the mass media, if the
intellectual quality of a university education has sunk to new
levels of mediocrity and ignorance, if a great many other
institutions of high culture have similarly settled for mistaken
notions of “democratic” change, it is in large part because their
governing boards have failed to uphold the standards appropriate to
the functions of these institutions. They have failed, in other
words, to appoint top executives who know what those standards are
and are willing to fight for their advancement.

It speaks well for both Mr. de Montebello and William H. Luers, the
outgoing president of the museum, that they have not allowed the
worst to happen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We weren’t so
lucky with Mr. Luer’s predecessor as president, however, and other
museums have similarly experienced grave problems caused by the
policy of divided authority. In a great art museum, there is no
substitute for a director—or, if you like, a chief executive
officer
—who really knows something about art, and it is a measure
of the present crisis that something so obvious even needs to be stated.
It is nice to know that, at the Met at least, this obvious fact of
cultural life has again been given its due.