Why art? Met director provides answer during keynote address

SANTA FE NM -- Art fans know that art and art museums are important. on the other hand when pressed, they often find it difficult to articulate why

level Philippe de Montebello, the director of novel York's Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) confesse that he, too, trys in this endeavor. The temptation is to be like children and say art matters "just because," de Montebello said during a July 15 address at Art Santa Fe a biennial contemporary art fair. "The reality is never to my replete satisfaction."

De Montebello, tall and graceful in an impeccable navy, double-breasted suit, took his audience upon a 70-minute odyssey exploring the idea of art, using slides from the Met His elegant voice is familiar to many who have visited the Met and have used the museum's audio guides.

In his keynote address, he brought to bear all his 28 years of experience at individual of the nation's premier cultural institutions and distilled it to a core truth: Art and museums provide us with the memory of mankind; and memory is identity.

level those words do not capture the reality of the matter, said de Montebello. "Words outside of poesy don't have much quality of immediacy. Not a single single of you jumped out of your seat to exclaim 'Eureka!'"

Rather, it was a series of new dramatic events that prompted like a reaction, he said. individual was the destruction of the immense Buddha statues in Bamayian, Afghanistan, as well as the wreckage of exhibits in the Kabul museum, the two by the fundamentalist Taliban. The other was the looting of the Baghdad museum after the U invasion.

There was widespread outrage worldwide, de Montebello said, level among those who knew little about the Buddhas or ancient Mesopotamia.

"It is this screech that represented to me the greatest in quantity eloquent testimony that people do care," he said. "Museums clutch things that express the deepest aspirations of a time and place." still he acknowledged, works of art are not easy to decipher.

"We must ask who made them, where, when and why" he said. "The answers are not obvious."

Using paintings and exhibits from the Met de Montebello l the audience upon a virtual lesson in making the greatest in quantity of a museum. "In a museum, we have the voluptuousness to wander at will, on the other hand this is also a trap," he said. "It causes us to disburse too little time in forehead of an exhibit."

single of the most inhibiting words used to describe art is "beautiful" because it places up expectations people feel they must appropriate in experiencing a work, he observ adding that there are many different kinds of beauty. a certain quantity of works are coarse or tough; others are repellant, on the other hand more affecting. Therefore, the lock opener to any work is in what manner convincingly an artist conveys his intent, he said.

greatest in quantity works reveal truths slowly, de Montebello explained. "Only if we make a certain quantity of effort can we appreciate art." This is especially real of exhibits, such as cases of clay ware where on first glance everything gazes similar. But taking time will yield marvellous discoveries, he said, showing the shards of stone in single case at the Met with sketches of birds and figures. These functioned as delineation pads for ancient artists. "It's like eavesdropping upon antiquity. It's not replicable anywhere other but in a museum."

individual of the most important exercise s visitors learn in museums is humility, de Montebello opined. "It teaches us that other and totally valid civilizations existed alongside our own"

by means of example, de Montebello showed a series of slides of different works, from an ivory crosier used by the agency of a Catholic archbishop that revealed influences of Islamic art to Chinese embroidery with flowers and a Phoenix that borrows from Indian textiles.

He demonstrated the decorative potential of repeated patterns in the woven fabric folds on both a 5th-century Buddha from India and a 12th-century Virgin and Child from France. The value of art museums allow visitors to mark and verify such similarities firsthand, he said.

Museums are also testaments to humanity itself, de Montebello continued. They showcase mankind's "awe-inspiring ability to surpass itself. No matter by what mode bleak the times, you cannot wholly despair of the human condition."

Therein lies the value of museums, he said. They are trustees of the qualities that matter. "Excellence transcendence and genius. The qualities that tip the scales in favor of man."

MEGAN KAMERICK

ABN Contributing Editor

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