David Patrick Columbia remembers Tom Hoving today on New York Social Diary as “an outspoken showman connoisseur [who] had the common touch for those things which brought out the king in all of us.” Having read much of the coverage of Hoving’s life in recent days, it seems that he was best-appreciated by the non-art types he spent his life luring into a once-cloistered world he knew as well as any (he was a Princeton PhD, after all) by demanding it be — and proving it could be — accessible to all. UPDATE: Columbia has run another great item on Hoving. “I last saw him at Georgette Mosbacher’s book party for Michael Gross and his Rogues Gallery biography of the Metropolitan Museum,” Columbia writes. “He was tall man, with a bright yet bemused personality. I asked him what he thought of the book. He said he thought Michael had pretty much got it right. I asked him what he thought of his portrait in the book. He said, ‘Well, I come off like an asshole, but then I am an asshole.’ And he laughed. And I laughed. I vote for him.”