Monday night’s Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum garnered less press attention than in previous years, but from the armchair view of one of the uninvited, the celebrity petting zoo was still a spectacle worthy of Rome. My favorite snapshot was of Marc Jacobs in a lacy see-through Comme des Garcons dress, Colonial-style buckled shoes and a pair of Brooks Brothers boxers (pictured). It reminded me of the night in 1990 when the Met Ball’s current mastermind, Vogue editrix Anna Wintour, turned up at a Giorgio Armani party at MoMA in a bright yellow sequined scuba-style dress by Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel. Why’d she do that? My guess was that Armani’s command performance–the premiere of a vanity film plunked into the midst of a busy fashion week–annoyed La Wintour. Who knows. And I don’t know what, besides a desire for attention, inspired Jacobs’ jaw-dropping outfit, but more power to him. Other observations: The New York Post front-paged the gala itself, the Times buried its coverage but front-paged an article about Amazon’s sponsorship of this year’s gala and the (surely entirely coincidental) simultaneous supercharging of its effort to compete with brick-and-mortar fashion retailers. Nice advertising, Amazon! My favorite comment on the gala comes at the close of New York Social Diary’s coverage by David Patrick Columbia. “Compared to the house that Vreeland (and the ladies) built,” Columbia writes, comparing the veddy social Met Party of the Year run by Diana Vreeland with today’s, “it may be just another McMansion, but then, that is the American culture of this era. Vogue is now. Anna Wintour is now. She is the Wintour of our discontent, and she’s damned good at it, you have to admit.” Another dis in a designer dress?

According to the Associated Press, $100 million of Brooke Astor’s fortune will now go to organizations like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library. But though his share of the estate has been halved, the AP says, son Anthony Marshall, who is appealing his conviction for, in part, engineering changes to her will when her mental capabilities had allegedly eroded, still gets $14.5 million. That may be an heircut, but it’s still a tidy sum. I wonder if he’ll leave anything to his son Philip, who engineered the public exposure of this private mess? Read the entire Stipulation of Settlement here [pdf warning].

A New York Times reporter has just broken the news of an (as yet undisclosed) settlement in the Brooke Astor estate battle in White Plains. His source? Philip Marshall (pictured), who put the family dispute in the public sphere when he accused his father of mistreating his grandmother, sent a text to the man from the Times. UPDATE: I;m told that News 12 in Westchester actually had it first. I’ll add details of the settlement once I have them.

Regular Gripepad readers will recall that two years ago, in an afterword to the paperback of Rogues’ Gallery, my history-cum-expose of the board and benefactors of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, I speculated on how the vice chairman of that board got her hands on one of the embargoed advance copies of the book. Which led to a pre-emptive threat (that thankfully proved empty) to sue my publisher and me for “gratuitous and false character assassination.” George Gurley of The New York Observer subsequently confirmed my suspicion that the embargo-breaker was Robert Silvers, the esteemed co-founder and editor of The New York Review of Books (pictured).

In an article in Saturday’s New York Times pegged to last week’s presentation of a lifetime achievement award to Silvers by the National Book Critics Circle, the 82-year-old is quoted on how “power and its abuses” fascinate him. His social ambition is referenced, too. He’s called “a voluptuary of sorts” who “has no objection at all to the company of the rich and titled.” Which may explain why he’s taken on the coloration of the objects of his fascination.

Galleycat, the publishing blog, asked me about all this at the time and I said I was shocked by his violation of a standard publishing practice. “It may not be strictly unethical,” I said, “but it’s certainly unprofessional and unseemly, particularly for someone who puts himself forward as an advocate for authors who try to write honestly about the powerful.” But as I wrote in that afterword, speaking truth to power doesn’t always win you Silvers-style friends in high places. And as Samuel Johnson wrote, there is sometimes a disconnect between literary appearance and worldly reality: “Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendour, grandeur and magnificence; but when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke.”

What’s the latest cause celebre at 1000 Fifth Avenue, I ask in my latest Crain’s New York Business Column. Is it (right-wing) donor David Koch? Or the Metropolitan Museum’s imperial mind-set?

Today’s announcement of a new head of contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in its in-house newsletter, er, sorry, the Arts section of the New York Times, was heavy on hand-fed detail but sorely lacking in context. The Met’s relationship to contemporary art has been contentious almost from the day the museum opened, and is an unlikely foundation for its emergence as “a Major Player,” as the C1 headline has it, yet art-world reporter Carol Vogel (who has gone far since her days as an assistant to caricature-quality fashion editor Carrie Donovan at the Times’ magazine) chose to concentrate on the Euro-centric board’s and (British) museum director Thomas Campbell‘s hiring of a (British) curator, Sheena Wagstaff, rather than the more serious and complex business of the museum’s highly fraught, century-plus hide-and-go-seek non-relationship with living artists. For more on that, I humbly suggest a look at my Rogues’ Gallery. Check the index for mentions of George Hearn, his Hearn Fund, the egregiously unsung Robert Beverly Hale, the extraordinary Henry Geldzhaler (pictured, who does rate a name-check from Vogel), and William S. Lieberman, to name but a few, for the context Vogel’s pals at the museum would probably prefer you forget. It’s a jungle at 1000 Fifth, Sheena. Make sure you bring your bug repellant.

Today’s Galleycat sent me racing to Fyrefly’s new Book Blogs Search Engine which revealed a review of Rogues’ Gallery I’d never seen before by the blogger Largehearted Boy. Read it here. But if clicking is too much for you, here are the two lines that made me ROLF: “Haven’t heard about this book despite a number of great reviews? We’re sure that has nothing to do with the people featured in the book being friends with people who run newspapers and magazines.”

Last week, the New York press predictably annnounced the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s abrupt 25% bump of its “suggested” admission price to $25 (that’s the old price displayed above) without much historical context or critical commentary. Only Louise Blouin‘s feisty artinfo.com hinted that to some, this might spell heartbreak or outrage. This morning, Judith H. Dobrzynski‘s RealClearArts took a stab at the plan, too, reviewing some of the recent history of the entry tariff and wondering why the museum doesn’t institute variable pricing. “Airlines, theater, and many other places have succeeded in using variable pricing, with few or no complaints from the public,” she notes. A bit more historic context might aid this discussion, even though the museum’s history is a topic that seems off limits to the sort of folk who are generally invited into it for free. (“I get invited to previews,” NPR’s Leonard Lopate warned me seconds before we went on the air to discuss my unauthorized history of the Met, Rogues’ Gallery. “Don’t screw that up for me.”)

According to research done by the Metropolitan Museum Historic District Coalition, the December 24, 1878, lease between the City of New York, which owns both the museum’s buildings and the land they occupy, and the Metropolitan, as amended by city law in 1892, still requires that the museum be open to the general public free of charge five days a week, with one being Sunday afternoons, throughout the year; be open to the general public free of charge two evenings a week; is foreclosed from being open Sunday mornings; must make up to the general public any holiday it chooses to close; and must be “open and accessible to art students, copyists and schools” during all operating hours.

“Museum officials use ambivalent and misleading verbiage like the word ‘Recommended’ to claim that a visitor’s admission is ‘voluntary,’ accordingly constitutes a ‘contribution’ not an ‘admission,’” the Coalition has said. The story of the museum’s “Pay What You Wish But You Must Pay Something,” admission policy is told in Rogues’ Gallery. Click a Rogues’ link to buy a copy.

Judith Dobrzynski‘s Real Clear Arts blog breaks the news that chairman of the department of European Art and Sculpture Ian Wardropper, who lost the top spot at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to his own underling, Tom Campbell, is decamping for the Frick Collection, where he, too, will be a museum director. Congratulations!

Yesterday’s announcement that the Metropolitan Museum of Art is likely to take over the Marcel Breuer-designed Brutalist building that now houses the Whitney Museum of American Art was expected. What it left out, however, was unexpected. The Soviet-style desire of the Met’s administration (and their friends and toadies in the New York cultural elite) to suppress its own fascinating and often impure history is well known, but that history is not entirely forgotten, even if you couldn’t read it yesterday. The decades-long enmity between the two museums and between the Met and contemporary art and artists is told at great length and in hilarious detail in Rogues’ Gallery. You can order a copy here.