Like Christopher Knight, the art critic of this paper, who thinks the current King Tut blockbuster exhibition is "smarmy," I am an art elitist. I hate these blockbuster crowds, the inflated admission prices and those things you stick in your ear for the platitudinous canned tour.
In Cairo, when I was organizing the first Tut show in 1975 (as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art), I was allowed into the Egyptian Museum after hours -- all alone -- and was given permission to open any case and to fondle the incomparable pieces. The first one was Tut's great gold mask, which I hefted from its pedestal and promptly kissed, full on the lips.
But Knight is way off when he slams art exhibition "blockbusters" (an old movie term to describe crowds that go around the block). I have been called the inventor of the art BB, and I guess I am. And I think that in order to determine if blockbusters are injurious to public health -- "pop-culture consumerism ... trotted out as artistic populism," as Knight puts it -- or if they are, in fact, highly beneficial to public education, a quickie history of the beast might help.
My first BB was launched in 1968 when Florence sent the Met dozens of beautiful medieval and Renaissance frescoes that had been removed from the walls after the disastrous flood of 1966. For this exhibit, we got our first corporate sponsor, Olivetti, which agreed to pay the cost of the entire show. We also took out ads in local newspapers for the first time in history -- "You'll never see the likes of them again," said one.
There was a near-riot in attendance the day after someone at a TV network hit the wrong feed button during the Super Bowl and our public service ad mistakenly aired. That drew an extra 20,000 people to the show, we estimated, bringing total attendance to 100,000.
It was only then that I fully realized that one of the prime missions of any great American art museum was to bring grand and unique works to our country -- works that would be difficult or impossible for people to see even if they traveled abroad -- and to make sure they were seen by the largest number of people possible. And to do that right, I realized, it was vital that we market those shows in the most vigorous and professional way.
We enhanced the idea of the blockbuster in the giant exhibitions during the Metropolitan's centennial in 1970 by arranging scholarly seminars for experts who came to the exhibit. The seminars were later published and the visiting experts told us that scholarship was incomparably boosted by blockbusters as a result. Seminars are standard ops today.
