Short review: Excellent renovations have really improved the American galleries but they’ve probably made things worse for visitors overall.
Long Review: How, exactly, do excellent renovations make things worse for visitors overall? Read on.
The Met has spent four years and $100 million overhauling most of its American Wing. Everything is better: the lighting, the labeling, the flow.
Everything. The old American Wing had been a bit of a maze, largely because of several expansions built around — but never fully integrated with — the original core.
Similar types of display objects, rather than being clustered together and ordered by some logical principle were spread all over the place. The paintings were on two floors and many of the best works hung in the staircase. There were small sets of stairs everyplace as you crossed between the original building and the additions.
The odd stairs remain in a few places, but everything else has been fixed. The improvement is particularly big for the paintings, which are now displayed on one floor, in a logical order, and with the best works nicely highlighted.
A trip to the new American wing is more coherent and informative, though a bit crowded.
Nonetheless, I still think museum goers are worse off for this renovation, because of that cost figure I mentioned. $100 million is a ton of money, enough, if well used, to build the current American Wing from scratch and acquire a few things to put in it. Even when you consider the cost of moving lots of walls and installing an elevator, I cannot possibly imagine how the renovations cost more than $10 million.
Did Met officials line their pockets with $90 million? Presumably not, but they certainly wasted tens of millions of dollars through some unknowable combination of incompetence and laziness. Heck, perhaps there was some corruption.
Granted, patrons could still come out ahead even if the Met really did pay ten times to much for the work — if the renovations made the experience dramatically better. But they don’t. They’re evolutionary, not revolutionary. I didn’t fly into a rage when I had to climb a flight of stairs to see the rest of the paintings.
The real question, I suppose, is whether I’d rather have these improvements or $100 million worth of new acquisitions, and the answer is easy. $10 million buys you a great work of art. $50 million buys you something so good that people will travel to see it. I’d rather have ten new great works or two new masterpieces. I think most art lovers would agree.
The other problem with the costs is that the museum does not bear them on its own, with money it magically prints up. It asks you for more money at the door and it asks the city for more money and it asks donors for more charity. This is money that could be going to research disease cures but instead it’s going to move walls. That’s hard to justify, particularly when you’re paying ten times too much to do it.
That said, you cannot undue the changes, so you might as well enjoy them.
The American Wing always merited a visit from anyone who likes art. It may be the best section of the best museum in the western hemisphere. But it’s even better now.
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