Banned in Britain… at the Met… and in the Big Apple?
Cityfile has picked up the story of the effective ban on Rogues’ Gallery in England and wonders if the saber rattling aimed at the book has been heard in New York newsrooms, too. As Francis Urquhart, the fictional Prime Minister of England in a trilogy of political novels (later made into a TV series starring […]
Gold for Goldfinger
“Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s shiny goddess is certainly perfect in a setting named after a metals magnate who inspired the James Bond villain Goldfinger,” Bloomberg art critic Linda Yablonsky writes in a review of the Metropolitan Museum’s newly renovated Charles Engelhard Court, going on to note that Engelhard’s “eccentric biography is retailed in Michael Gross’s new Rogues’ […]
The Met speaks (or at least, a few employees do)
Several e-mails arrived in the last 24 hours from employees at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One came from inside the Metropolitan bookstore, where the book is apparently banned: “I just find it amusing how many people ask for it.” Another was from someone who works in the museum proper: “I simply wanted to express […]
Speaking of libel tourism…
Writing in London’s Independent, Alice Azania-Jarvis, author of its Pandora column, reveals that the threat of libel tourism is why the book-loving British can’t buy Rogues’ Gallery. As the New York Times so wisely editorialized yesterday, saber-rattling by “wealthy and litigious people” is not only “bad for writers,” it’s “bad for everyone.”
Oh, Canada
“Finally, a book about art and the wealthy,” says Maclean’s, the Canadian newsweekly. “Michael Gross‘s unauthorized look at the Metropolitan Museum of Art… starts with its first director, a fake Italian count — neither the Met’s first nor last acquisition of dubious title. There’s also J. Pierpont Morgan and various Rockefellers, Anna Wintour and Johnny […]
Truth is beauty
From this morning’s editorial decrying libel tourism in The New York Times: “If authors believe they are too vulnerable, they may be discouraged from taking on difficult and important topics, like terrorism financing, or from writing about wealthy and litigious people. That would not only be bad for writers, it would be bad for everyone.”
“A terrific tale… stuff that more people should know,” says USA Today
“As journalist Michael Gross shows in his history of the gentlemen and geniuses, barbarians and social-climbers who have run the Met since it was founded in 1870, proximity to the glorious art of humanity doesn’t necessarily improve the humans who document, collect and display it,” writes Maria Puente in USA Today. ” Great collections aren’t […]
Hail to thee, blithe spirit
Madame Arcati, the UK media blog, has entered the ring with a stirring defense of Rogues’ Gallery. “Indisputably,” writes the pseudonymous blogger named for an eccentric medium in a Noel Coward play “Gross… hit a raw nerve about a national institution. What is unacceptable is the suspected exercise of informal social power to, in effect, […]
Who do YOU trust?
Two top officials of the Metropolitan Museum of Art have offered violently opposing opinions on Rogues’ Gallery. One is the prevailing opinion of the Manhattan plutocracy, too. What do you think? Harold Holzer, the museum’s current Senior Vice President for External Affairs, says: “A so-called ‘history’ of The Metropolitan Museum of Art that ignores its […]
Shine a light
“You are to be commended for shining a light on the highest levels of hypocrisy in New York Society,” writesChristopher London, editor of ManhattanSociety.com. Either that or condemned!