How do you make ancient pieces of art relevant to a modern audience?
I think we can do more. For example, last October, we reopened the new galleries of our Islamic art department. It's about 10 years after 9/11. I think before 9/11 most Americans probably had relatively little understanding of Islam. And then, in that terrible moment, the perception was inevitably filtered through a very polarized light. What we've done in reopening these galleries is present 14 centuries of the evolution of many Islamic arts. And what's amazing to me, but not surprising, is that since we opened those galleries, we've had 370,000 visitors in four months. The galleries are drawing crowds as if they were one of our most popular temporary exhibitions.
How do you sustain that kind of interest?
While we're addressing people who know a huge amount, the Met mustn't be perceived as an elitist intuition. I've put quite a lot of energy into thinking about how we can make it feel more accessible.
Take advertising: for some reason there had been a tradition that we never showed people with works of art. I'm not quite sure where that came from. One of the first things I did when I became director was start an advertising campaign called "It's time we Met." One ad in the series showed a couple kissing in front of Rodin's sculpture "The Kiss."
Similarly, we're about to redesign the plaza outside. Most of it looks like a bit like a prison yard, it's austere, it's forbidding. We want to have an attractive place where people feel good about arriving at the Metropolitan.
We're thinking much more creatively about what it is like to be a first time visitor. Amazingly, when I came, the galleries had never even been numbered.
Has it been difficult to get people on board with your vision for the museum?
Well, a week after the announcement of my appointment, Lehman Brothers went down. As I waited in the wings, I saw the whole stock market collapsing. The silver lining, in so far as there was one, is that it might have taken me quite a while as a young new director to get people on board. But the external finances forced all of our staff to think hard about our core priorities, so I could come in and really get my agenda going.
Do you remember when you first fell in love with tapestries, your area of expertise?
I was lucky, as a young art historian, I was studying art as it was then defined, which is painting and sculpture and architecture, and I realized the patrons of the past were spending huge amounts of money on tapestries, so I began looking at tapestries while traveling.
