How the Metropolitan Museum Plans to Save Itself
Every few months during his tenure as director and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas P. Campbell would host a town hall for staffers alongside Daniel H. Weiss, the president he brought in to get the museum’s finances under control. The two made quite a pair: Campbell, the charming Englishman with a boyish mop of hair, and Weiss, the stolid administrator tasked with keeping Campbell’s flights of fancy grounded in reality.
Campbell had been charged with steering the museum into a new era, expanding its contemporary art holdings and increasing its presence online, and opening the Met Breuer, at a cost of nearly $13 million to renovate and $17 million a year to operate, while Weiss tried to keep the trains running on time.
But by last summer the Met was facing an $8.2 million deficit. Campbell had served as museum director since January 2009, when he succeeded Philippe de Montebello, the longest-serving leader in the museum’s history, and excitement about him had waned.
The old guard loyal to de Montebello began to leave, and the beefed-up digital operation was decimated. For those who remained, death was coming by paper cut, even though the Met boasted a $3 billion endowment and a board that remains the social apex of New York City, with Annette de la Renta, Henry Kissinger, David Koch, and others listed as emeritus trustees.
The Met board is new money, and new money has new priorities.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the board steered the museum to safe fiscal waters, helping it withstand the downturn better than many other institutions, a fact that Met staffers at a town hall in June pointed out. Why weren’t they stepping up this time? Weiss sighed. “We are working closely with the board to solve the problem,” he said.
The Met’s board underwent a sea change during the Campbell era. Grand figures like Brooke Astor were gone, and while the board (which currently numbers 101 members) remains a social register of New York, it is now a more democratic place than it once was.
“It isn’t the society dinner party that it used to be, when Mrs. Astor would pass a thousand-year-old plate around at a meeting and say, ‘Wouldn’t this make a nice hat?’” says journalist Michael Gross, who has written extensively about the museum. “It’s more diverse, but it doesn’t have the noblesse oblige that the old board had. It’s new money, and new money has new priorities.”
Keeping Campbell in the top job was not one of them. In February 2017 he resigned, reportedly under pressure. It was a long-rumored departure that nevertheless came abruptly. Heads were still spinning from Campbell’s resignation when it was reported that a staffer had accused the director of having a personal relationship with a junior member of the revamped digital department.
Although it wasn’t the reason he left his post, the tabloids pounced, and Weiss, the Met president who co-hosted Campbell’s town halls, was named interim CEO before being officially appointed chief executive upon Campbell’s departure in June. In a flip-flop, the new director (yet to be appointed by the board) will report to the president.
A recruiting firm has been retained, and a job description is expected to be released this fall; there is no official timeline for filling the position. Weiss has promised further retrenchment: fewer exhibitions, more trimming of back office costs, a longer delay in opening a $600 million wing that Campbell had hoped would debut by the time the Met celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2020.
Weiss came to the Met in 2015 to replace Emily Rafferty, a de Montebello ally and a beloved figure in the New York art world. Weiss was seemingly bioengineered for such a moment: a PhD in art history from Johns Hopkins, an MBA from Yale, a stint at the consulting firm Booz Allen, a decadelong career teaching art history to Hopkins undergraduates during which he rose to become chair of the department and then dean of faculty before moving on to serve as president of Lafayette College and then Haverford.
People inside and outside the museum say that he impressed almost immediately. Soon after taking the job, Weiss briefed senior members of the museum on the Met’s declining financial situation, warning that the deficit could balloon to $40 million within 18 months. He and Campbell were close, Met insiders say, and they saw their role as not just running the museum but rethinking what a museum in the 21st century should look like.
Campbell wanted to do everything all at once, while Weiss was more aware of limits—financial, geographic, physical.
“None of the things that Tom started about the digital revolution or improving accessibility are going to stop,” says Soyoung Lee, a curator of Korean art. “But Dan is the leader who will think about innovation while balancing the budget.” His former colleagues agree. Morris Offit, who served as chair of the Hopkins board during Weiss’s tenure, says, “I was surprised when he was hired that the Met could be that creative.”
With the Met seeming more and more like an institution losing its way at the end of the Campbell era, many people in the New York art world saw Weiss as the inevitable replacement. “There was a sense when Dan got there that it was at last getting under control,” Offit says.
Campbell, who declined to comment for this story, concurred, calling his departure mutually agreed upon, now that his successor had been installed. “The museum is in a very strong place,” he told the Art Newspaper in July. “Dan Weiss, with whom I have worked so closely, is up to speed. He is a very strong leader, so the museum is in good hands.”
In August it was announced that Campbell’s next gig would be as the beneficiary of a research grant that would see him splitting the next eight months between the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and Waddesdon Manor in England.
The Met is in a predicament unprecedented in its history, with record-setting attendance and critically lauded exhibitions, but with a gaping budget deficit unrelieved by the recently roaring stock market, an economic scenario lesser institutions have taken advantage of. The museum must now determine whether the problems it faces are because of Campbell or if they begin with the lions who make up the board of trustees.
The Met, de Montebello used to say, was like an ocean liner: Turn it too swiftly and it will run aground. For a time Campbell sailed on the smooth waters of his predecessor’s wake. Then he set out to chart his own course, “taking managerial advice to move some of the furniture around,” as one insider put it. This included the ill-conceived replacement of the Met’s capital M logo (based on a woodcut from the shop of Leonardo da Vinci) with a blocky “THE MET.”
A “typographic bus crash,” as one review put it.
The experiment with digital media fared no better. In 2010 the Met hired Erin Coburn as its first digital chief. She lasted two years, leaving amid allegations that a relationship between Campbell and one of her female staff members made her job impossible. The Met denied the allegations, and the museum has said that, after a thorough investigation, claims of a hostile work environment were found to be without merit.
Coburn was replaced by Sree Sreenivasan, a former Columbia journalism school professor who didn’t fare much better and who was let go in June 2016 with only two hours’ notice, upon which he Facebooked his departure from Central Park.
Trouble also marked the Met’s foray into contemporary art, which, to de Montebello’s loyalists, seemed to be an effort to keep up with what’s cool at the expense of 5,000 years of culture. Modern collections, the thinking went, come en masse, like Leonard Lauder’s 78 Cubist works, which Campbell snagged in 2013. It was also pointed out that there is no shortage of options for people in New York who want to see contemporary art. Campbell’s camp countered that if the Met wants to consider itself an encyclopedic museum, it must include modern and contemporary art.
Campbell didn’t come in as a contemporary art connoisseur. He began as the head of the tapestry department and is the author of Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence. The contemporary push came from the board, half of whom, by one estimation, are contemporary collectors. “There were a lot of trustees who were just hell-bent on capitalizing on their stake in the contemporary world,” said one dealer close to several of them. “They think this is where the money is, and the interest is, so they pushed hard on that.”
The board currently includes chairman Daniel Brodsky, the scion of a New York real estate family, as well as vice chairs Richard Chilton Jr., one of the richest hedge fund executives in the world; Russell L. Carson, a venture capitalist whose firm has managed more than $22 billion in capital; and Lulu C. Wang, a hedge fund manager and a collector of antique automobiles who in 2000 gave $25 million to Wellesley College, her alma mater.
That board worked for Philippe, not the other way around.
But the board as a whole was unwilling to cover the Met’s losses, even though few doubted that the situation would have played out differently had de Montebello remained in charge. “That board worked for Philippe, not the other way around,” said one former colleague of de Montebello’s.
Membership on the board is an opportunity to hobnob at the highest level. “Gilt by association,” staffers call it. And as those staffers saw their benefits and jobs cut, they became a little bitter. “Any one of those trustees could have filled that gap—any one of them,” says Otto Naumann, a dealer in Old Masters in New York. “They are throwing him to the wolves.”
Others disagree. “No trustee is going to say, ‘Here, we’ll give you $20 million because we love you so much,’ ” one current trustee says. “This is self-inflicted. The Met has never had a problem raising money. The fact that we can’t now is demoralizing to everyone. We have ambitious plans. We just don’t have the money.”
For now the Met’s troubles are interwoven. Does the museum make a major play in contemporary art? Doing so would mean cannibalizing its existing collection of art history. Does it build and expand, not just to the Breuer but elsewhere in Manhattan, or beyond? Where does the money come from? Can the Met be a comprehensive museum that is slightly less comprehensive, one more aware of its limitations?
Robert Storr, a former curator at the Museum of Modern Art and onetime dean of the Yale School of Art, said that the appointment of someone with a corporate background to run the entire institution sent an unmistakable signal that businesspeople were now in charge and that financial concerns would trump art historical ones.
The minute trustees begin to say the mechanics of running a museum are the first priority, they are effectively saying that the art is not.
“The minute trustees begin to say the mechanics of running a museum are the first priority, they are effectively saying that the art is not. The trustees didn’t take responsibility for creating the mess that Tom Campbell left, and I’m not sure they are able or inclined to see much beyond the bottom line at this point.”
Soon after being named CEO, however, Weiss met with the staff and assured them that all matters relating to art and exhibitions would be handled by the soon-to-be-named director. “I know he’s being characterized as a businessperson,” Lee says of Weiss. “I think he would hate that.”
Few doubt that the Met will eventually find its way. But the ship has run aground, and at the moment there is no clear plan for how to fix it. “Dan isn’t fazed in the least by all the chaos of the moment,” says Offit, who counts Weiss as a close friend. He summarized Weiss’s thinking about his new job this way: “Things got a little out of control. But they can easily be brought back into balance.”
