'Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum' by Michael Gross

A profile of Thomas P. Campbell in a recent issue of the New Yorker limns the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new director in what instantly became the standard portrait when news broke that he got the job last September. He's a scholarly and unassuming curator, not known for being adept at the social razzle-dazzle that generates publicity and philanthropy, and therefore a surprising choice to lead a major American art museum.

The fact that Campbell's 2002 sleeper exhibition, "Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence," utterly transformed the place of monumental woven imagery in art's history books, all while drawing more than 200,000 wide-eyed visitors to the museum's darkened galleries, hovers in the background as a genuine if picturesque accomplishment for a director's portfolio, more quaint than indispensable.

Michael Gross' new book about the Met is one example of why we commonly think this way about art museums and what drives them. "Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum" is stuffed with assorted Morgans, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers and their more recent brethren -- not to mention "sistren," such as Brooke Astor, Jayne Wrightsman and Annette de la Renta. But it doesn't provide the kind of deep insight into a major cultural institution one wants from social history.

Nor is it good, gossipy summer beach reading, alas.

"Rogues' Gallery" is essentially a Met-size compendium of short biographies, including 19th century archaeological adventurer (and huckster) Luigi Palma di Cesnola and 20th century grandee Philippe de Montebello, whose exile in the wilds of Texas, where he headed the art-poor Houston Museum of Fine Arts before launching a 31-year tenure at the helm of the Mighty Met, seems somehow biblical. As the subtitle suggests, the book is more about the moguls and their money than the museum.

Gross' 2005 book, "740 Park," was a soap opera -- Fortune called it "apartment porn" -- about the super-rich who have lived at one very tony Upper East Side address. (Beverly Hills, Bel-Air and Holmby Hills are the focus of Gross' next real-estate-driven project.) The Park Avenuers intersect with the Met's influential list of benefactors, past and present. The most important was John D. Rockefeller Jr., who -- although never formally affiliated with the Met as a trustee -- was a patient and determined plutocrat who got the Cloisters, the Met's medieval outpost in northern Manhattan's Fort Tryon Park, built and stocked with treasure.