The fine art of back-scratching
It’s been almost eleven months since the Metropolitan Museum named Thomas Campbell, a British tapestries expert, its new director. Since then, he’s given only a few interviews, none of them particularly revealing of either his personality (shy but graceful) or his plans for the museum (spend less, update the web site). But his — or […]
“Tantalizing… irresistable… one of the year’s most entertaining books,” says The Daily Beast
Nancy Bass Wyden, third-generation owner of one of New York’s finest book stores, The Strand, has posted her summer reading list on The Daily Beast, and Rogues’ Gallery tops the list. “Who doesn’t love the Met, and who wouldn’t want to read tantalizing gossip about the upper echelon of social climbers, philanthropists, and curators who […]
“Endlessly entertaining,” says Newport Seen
“Will New York ever be the same?” asks Linda Phillips on her Newport Seen web site, covering my talk about Rogues’ Gallery last week at the Redwood Athanaeum, the oldest continuously operating private library in America. “On hand were Jae French… Kimberly Skeen Jones, Nannette and George Herrick, Douglas Riggs, President of the Board, and […]
“Don’t miss Rogues’ Gallery,” says The Atlantan
This one’s a peach. “If you thought former J. Paul Getty Museum curator Marion True’s illegally procured antiquities trial was a cause célèbre, don’t miss Rogue’s Gallery,” says The Atlantan‘s Felicia Feaster. “Michael Gross’s 483-page behemoth (on the heels of his equally dishy 740 Park) recounts the prestigious museum’s often-unsavory elitism… early acquisition practices others […]
“This book is a museum piece,” says Page Six
Page Six in the New York Post covers my two-day visit to Newport, Rhode Island, today. My next signing and talk will be Labor Day weekend at Bookhampton in East Hampton.
Staycation Time
Sometimes, you don’t need to leave home to travel. My two latest articles for Travel + Leisure prove the point. One looks at Manhattan’s new restaurant row, 58th Street from river to river, featuring food from the ends of the earth. The other, at the long, lush-life history an old favorite that’s been refreshed, the […]
Arty Party People
The Metropolitan Museum’s tight-as-a-tick relationship with Vogue Magazine will be on display next Tuesday when the magazine’s editor, Anna Wintour, and the museum president, Emily Rafferty, host what’s described as an “intimate” luncheon for Vogue’s outgoing party planner Stephanie Winston Wolkoff. Today’s Fashion Week Daily has a guest list that includes (no surprise) Oscar de […]
The Song Remains The Same
Those who forget the past, they say, are condemned to repeat it. So in all the wailing and rending of garments over what the current financial crisis has done to cultural institutions, it is often forgotten that their literal fortunes have waxed and waned before, and typically, the strong, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, […]
Jewels of the Giulia
Last week, I nearly crossed paths with Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic of The New York Times, who went to Rome to visit the Euphronios krater, the Greek vase famously smuggled out of Italy, sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1972, and finally returned to Italy thirty-some-odd years later following a lengthy investigation […]
“No-holds-barred,” says the Financial Post
Canada’s Financial Post says Rogues’ Gallery is “stuffed with entertaining – and often embarrassing – detail about the Met’s administrators and donors.”