Phillipe de Montebello, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has outdone himself in this Sunday Arts featurette from Public Television’s Channel Thirteen website. Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate defines hypocrisy as the act of playing a part on a stage, feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not, and as this column has predicted he would, Montebello hits all three out of the park with this broadcast tribute to the late Tom Hoving, his predecessor, sponsor and mentor at the Metropolitan. More on this subject will be included in a new update chapter for the paperback edition of Rogues’ Gallery, to be published next spring. For now, I’ll offer only a corrective quote from the hardcover. A day after an encounter with Montebello in the early 1990s, the late architect and museum executive Arthur Rosenblatt taped an official museum Oral History (currently locked up, unseen and unread, in the museum’s archives): “He chatted about Tom Hoving [and] used language that is inappropriate and… rough,” Rosenblatt reported. “He’s a shmuck,” the uncensored Montebello said. “A schmuck.” To Hoving’s eternal credit, he said far worse about himself. But his successor’s posthumous embrace is as disingenuous as it was expected.