The New Yorker:

“Here time becomes space.” A famously enigmatic line from Richard Wagner’s “Parsifal” toyed with my mind during a recent visit, my first since last winter, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It chimed with my experience as I prowled the prodigious institution, which has been celebrating, in a pandemically muted manner, its hundred-and-fiftieth birthday as the world’s chief encyclopedic art museum. “Making the Met,” a huge show, roughly tracks the sequence of the museum’s acquisitions and policies since its founding, in 1870. A hundred and fifty is a lot of years, though a mere flicker compared with the five millennia’s worth of objects from the permanent collections that are sampled in the show.

If you’re so inclined, there’s much to think about when considering the successive mind-sets of patrician New York, from Eurocentric Victorian tastes to universalist ideals—an evolution that has rarely been rapid. Art that the Met deemed “primitive” was initially consigned to the American Museum of Natural History, across Central Park. This gaffe was remedied in the nineteen-seventies with spectacular gifts of African and Polynesian items that Nelson Rockefeller had amassed for his own Museum of Primitive Art. Photography, scorned for decades, arrived with a bang in the twenties and thirties, thanks to the indefatigable lobbying of Alfred Stieglitz. Three exquisite crepuscular prints of the Flatiron Building, by Edward Steichen, from 1904, heralded that breakthrough. But derelictions persist from the starchy conservatism that long retarded the museum’s engagement with twentieth-century art, when it lazily let the Museum of Modern Art get the best stuff while the getting was good. Complaints about chronic cluelessness at the Met were once common in the art world, unmitigated by such maladroit stabs at contemporaneity as “New York Painting and Sculpture,” a show in 1969 by the putatively hip curator Henry Geldzahler, which mistook abstract painting as the wave of the future and included just one woman, Helen Frankenthaler, and no Black artists. And the less that’s remembered the better of a patronizing debacle from the same year, “Harlem on My Mind,” which again excluded artists of color. The Met is endeavoring to counter its legacy of benightedness on this score, but, like the turning of a battleship, the process is gradual.

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