3 Takeaways - Hear, Here: The President and CEO of NY’s Metropolitan Museum On Its Critical Role In Modern Life (#148)

Episode Date: June 6, 2023

New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is a beloved and important cultural icon. Here, its President and CEO, Dan Weiss, shares his brilliant insight into the essential role of art museums in contemporary life, the astonishing growth of the Met’s online audience, how technology helps satisfy the human need to connect with art, and more.

Welcome to the Three Takeaways podcast, which features short, memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other newsmakers. Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers. And now your host and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, Lynn Thoman. Hi, everyone.

It's Lynn Thoman. Welcome to another Three Takeaways episode. Today, I'm excited to be with Dan Weiss, the president and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum, one of the greatest museums in the world. Dan is unusual in having both an art history background and a business background. At Johns Hopkins University, he was an art history professor, then head of the art history department, and finally dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Arts and Sciences. He also has a business background, including a degree from Yale School of Management and expertise working as a consultant. Dan's new book, which is excellent, is Why the Museum Matters. I'm excited to learn why art and museums matter today more than ever, how art history has changed, and what museums at their best can offer. Welcome, Dan, and thanks so much for our conversation today.

Thanks so much, Lynn. It's great to be here with you. It is my pleasure. Dan, what are museums at their best? I think museums at their best are vibrant community centers that connect ideas to people in myriad ways, which is to say that they're doing an excellent job of serving the needs of schoolchildren, the elderly, scholars, amateurs, that the place is working for the community that surrounds the

institution. And how do you define success for the Met? Well, we think about that in a variety of ways. And most mission-driven institutions, of course, struggle with that question. How do you know you're delivering value when it's not that easy to measure? And for us, we have certain obvious metrics, like the number of people who come through our doors each day to see our exhibitions. We track all kinds of information about numbers of people visiting, where they come from, their demographic background, their educational background, all kinds of things that help us get a sense for who's in our building. And then we want to know what they're actually doing. We are a 2.1 million square foot place where there are lots and lots of things to see. So we want to know what people are visiting,

what they're engaging with, what they're finding interesting. So we do all kinds of evaluations and measurement of our visitors. But most important, I think there's a larger set of data and information that we can gather. And that is by reflecting over the course of months and years, how we're engaging the people who come in the building. Are we actually a welcoming place to people from far and wide? Not just we want the same old people to come who always come who love the institution, which is great, but we want new visitors. So we're looking at who we're reaching and how we're reaching them, and we're evaluating our success in so doing. The academic study of art history determined for the Western world the types of art that museums collected and exhibited.

How has the discipline of art history changed? The discipline of art history has changed commensurately with the discipline of museum studies and what museums actually do. And it's an interesting, if I may, I'll lapse into a little bit of a historical narrative about the Met. When the Met was founded in 1870, the guiding vision was to create an institution that would be of service to the entire population. The idea was working people who didn't necessarily have access to education. How do we make sure this museum serves all of their needs? So the goal was the place would be open to everyone.

And there wasn't very much reflection on what the museum should contain, because it was almost self-evident in 1870 that what the museum should contain is great art. So that means art from Italy and France and Germany and England, and did I say Italy? And then there's Greece, and that sort of covers it. And they didn't really reflect in a self-conscious way on what cultural production ought to be examined and presented within the museum, because in the age of the Enlightenment, that was seen as a rather limited question. So over the course of the next century and a half, the museum has been much more thoughtful about if we are to be a museum for everyone of the art of civilization and cultural production across generations and locations and geographies, then we need to expand that. And the Met and other museums have done that. Here's the tricky part of that issue.

As we expand our collections, we also have to commensurately expand our expertise, because you do justice to nothing if you don't actually know what it is you have, and you don't know how to take care of these objects, you don't know how to study them, or what stories they can tell. So we have grown in this carefully calibrated way where our collections expand and our professional expertise expands with it, which is one reason why the museum has gotten so large. And that is an ongoing project. Our goal at the Met is to collect the art of all civilizations across all of time. And so far, we've made a small start. There's a lot more out there for us to be gathering.

We often hear that museums serve the community, but what does that actually mean? In this country, and I think we distinguish American museums from, say, their model in Europe, because museums in this country were, for the most part, founded by the communities themselves. That is, there are some museums in this country, like the Smithsonian, that are primarily owned by the government. But even those, their funding levels, the majority of their funding does not come from the government. It comes from other places. So museums are owned by and operated by the larger community. They are, in some ways, I often call them a social experiment. The idea was, in 1870, can we create an institution, commensurate in quality with the greatest cultural institutions in the world that serves all of the population here and that is funded by all of the population here and not primarily the government.

We're not owned by one donor or one government, but actually many, many different sources. And because we have to be accountable to so many stakeholders, our programming is far more, I think, engaged in understanding what the needs are of the populations around us. The art of getting this right is not to pander to audiences, but to serve audiences in ways that enrich them and inspire them and provide meaningful experiences, including fun within the museum. Because we are of and for the community, we can do that better than if we were owned by one entity and delivering some sort of service the way, say, a commercial business might. How do you decide what art is worth collecting?

Well, that is the perennial question that all museums must face. We have a large professional staff in every area in which we collect has curatorial expertise and conservation expertise that can make evaluative judgments about what will withstand historical scrutiny, what represents important innovations or contributions to the world of humanity. And every object that we collect is in a sense a bet, because we don't know for sure. We may have our own judgment, and that's good enough for us in our lifetimes that maybe we should collect the art of Vincent van Gogh, even though in his own day, he was seen as a failure, and nobody collected his art when he was alive. Today, that would be preposterous to say we're not going to collect Vincent van Gogh. So we make the judgments, but from one generation

to the next, those evaluative approaches evolve because we know more, our learning evolves, but also our values evolve. When something goes into the Met, we think it has enduring historical importance, that it will be of value across generations, and that it will serve to advance the museum's mission to add to the light and understanding of the history of culture. Museums that are dedicated to contemporary art have a slightly different proposition. They can be a bit more risky, that their job is not necessarily to canonize, but to present and explore and study and debate in a more edgy way than, say, the Met is. What are some of the most unusual exhibits that you've seen either at the Met or elsewhere that go beyond the traditional presentation of art?

Well, one of the things I love about the museum world is that there are always new and innovative ways to tell stories. Here at the Met, we do many, many exhibitions where we try to fold into the presentation of art and understanding of the larger context in which that art was created. And I can think of many examples. We did an exhibition on Jerusalem, the idea of Jerusalem and the reality of Jerusalem throughout the life of the Middle Ages and into the modern era. And that exhibition, I think, was especially compelling because it allowed us to see and explore works of art that were made in Jerusalem or of Jerusalem across time in settings where you'd see all kinds of different things, works of architectural elements, illuminated manuscripts, paintings, texts, all kinds of different objects that collectively produced a certain

sense of the spirit of the idea of Jerusalem as much as the reality. Or another one that I think, I'll stay with the map because I know it best, that I think was especially innovative was an exhibition we did about five years ago on Michelangelo. And what made that show so compelling was that the centerpiece of the exhibition was really to look at Michelangelo's drawings, which we were able to borrow. And from our own collections, it was a very substantial show, primarily of Michelangelo's drawings. The curator, Carmen Bombach, wanted to tell the story of Michelangelo as a monumental artist, because in her view, whether he was making big things or small things, he was always monumental in his ambition,

and even small objects had a certain kind of pretense to be monumental. So the show was installed with lots of spaces between the drawings in high ceiling rooms in a way that spoke to the grandeur of the objects themselves. And as one's moving through this exhibition, one could get a sense the ways in which Michelangelo always thought big. And then in the riskiest part of the exhibition, we actually recreated on a fairly large scale the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel so that one could see actually how to relate these drawings to the result. Not all of the drawings were preparatory to the Sistine Chapel by any

means, but you would go into this massive space and you could get some sense of how challenging it was for Michelangelo lying on his back for something like four years to paint this massive ceiling with the same kind of ambition to monumentality that he brought to these small drawings that he was doing. And it allowed us then to see the arc of Michelangelo's career from the small to the large in ways that gave, I think, a defining purpose to his ambition as an artist. And I think only an exhibition could do that. The Met has a long and storied history of doing blockbuster special exhibits, including

the Mona Lisa way back in the 1960s, the treasures from the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen, and more recently, the famous Chinese terracotta warriors. How do you think about special exhibits? They were a very successful experiment, and the idea of blockbuster exhibitions, big ones, was invented here at the Met by Tom Hovind, who was the director in the 1960s and 70s. They serve many purposes, but one is,

it provides something new and fresh in the museum for people to react to and to discuss and to learn from. So an exhibition program for most museums is now seen as an essential element of what we do, whereas 50 years ago or more, that wasn't the case. In the 1930s, 40s, 50s, whatever, you would just go into a museum and see the permanent collection each time you came. The great advantage of special exhibitions, whether they're blockbusters or very small shows dedicated to a focused issue, is that they provide all of us with the same material around which to learn and discuss. And that creates community in its own way. So when the Met has an exhibition of any size, we bring in audiences to

come and see it. We bring in critics or they come on their own. We don't bring them. They review the show. They have their own opinions. People discuss and debate this show or that show. And it allows people to come together to learn something together. And I think ultimately, special exhibitions revitalize and add intellectual substance to or revitalization, I guess, to the work we do on a regular basis. And now at the Met, special exhibitions are a major part of what we do. And we do, I don't know, 40 or 50 exhibitions a year at some scale. And again, in 1950, we did, I don't know, two, maybe. It's a big difference. And I think it's made a very

large contribution to the museum experience for people. One of the major changes in recent years is the huge expansion in both the physical audience who come to the Met in person and the vast numbers of people who visit the Met online. Let's talk about both of those audiences. First, how large are they both? Well, our on-site audiences just prior to COVID were just over 7 million people. And we were one of the two or three largest, most well-visited art museums in the world. Post-COVID, those numbers are climbing back. And so we're in 4 or 5 million territory now as we begin to see the continued restoration of international tourism. But our digital audiences can be much larger than that. And we bring in very large numbers of people.

I don't have the exact number at my fingertips, but any one thing we do might bring in 30, 40, 50, 60,000 people for, let's say, a virtual opening of an exhibition where on a special night, people can go through the exhibition with a curator on their computer. And that might be 30 or 40,000 people who participate in that. Both aspects of connecting people to our mission are really important. The on-site experience is not replaceable or substitutable by digital experience, but it is very much complementary. And even before COVID, we knew that our web offerings provided essential learning materials for people all around the world who might never come here. That school children all over the world use our website for their curriculum to learn about the history of art. We have something on our website called the Timeline of Art History,

which was one of the most useful educational tools for learning about the history of art that exists anywhere. And we're very proud of that, that part of our mission is to connect people to educational opportunities in those ways, even if they don't live here. What we have found that's interesting is that the advent of really dazzling technologies has not supplanted or in any way replaced the on-site experience, but actually it has complemented it. For those people who have access to the museum, they don't stop coming because they can see it online. They actually see it online, then they want to go see the real thing. And that idea of direct and immediate access to great works of art is something I think human

beings are wired to want to do. In the same way we're social animals, and we are driven to want to be with others and to have interaction with others, There's something about the immediacy of the sensory experience of seeing works of art directly that I don't think is at risk in any way. I think, as I say, it's complementary, but the access to new technologies that are coming along, including now AI, which is the latest thing people are talking about, will certainly continue to enliven and enrich the visitor's experience in, I think, good ways. Someone who's not in New York wanting to see online a famous painting has the option to either go to the website of the museum that owns the painting or to the website of whoever provides the best online experience for viewing the painting.

How do you think about the potential competition for online art viewing? I think that's all to the good. I'm a great believer that competition in anything generally makes the thing better. And so our goal at the Met is to do justice to our collections and tell stories in ways that we think will engage audiences, whether we're doing it on site or online. We produce an enormous amount of online content, videos and all kinds of things. And the great benefit of living in the world we live in today is you can search any subject you're interested in. If you're interested in Van Gogh's Cyprus paintings, you can just do a search of Van Gogh's Cypress paintings and you will find yourself in short order on our website, among other places. And I think the learning, we all do this. I think the great advantage of that kind of educational inquiry allows you to move very quickly through materials to find the ones that are most substantive and most aligned to what you're hoping to learn about. And we are very happy to be part of that larger conversation.

And our job is to produce content that merits not only going to our website, but we measure how long they stay. And so if somebody comes to your website and they spend 12 seconds, then that's not a particularly successful encounter. But if they stay for several minutes or even longer than that, then it means they're taking in your material and learning from it. We want both of those things to happen. We want people to come to our site and to learn from it. But there's nothing wrong with having them also go elsewhere because in the larger conversation around any issue or any subject, more different points of view, I think the more informed the learning will be. Your numbers are stunning on in-person versus

online. If several hundred people come in a day to see an exhibit and 30,000 to 40,000 people see the exhibit online, you're talking about 100x difference, which is enormous. It used to be that the art that a museum had in its collection was all that mattered. But if the digital experience is increasingly important, how does that change museums? Doesn't it mean that collecting and owning the art is less important. How does that change museums? Doesn't it mean that collecting and owning the art is less important? Well, first of all, I think having access to or understanding the centrality both of the real on-site experience as well as the digital one is important. And what the COVID era did for us is it accelerated our own development of better and more sophisticated

online approaches so that audiences could have new and interesting ways to see art. And I think that's a very important and positive thing. As I say, though, it doesn't substitute for the opportunity to see the real object. And I think both of those are really important and really positive. And that ultimately, there's perhaps a slightly different kind of learning or complementary learning. The scale of doing it online is certainly overwhelming because you can reach, as you say, tens of thousands or millions of people through your website. But for us, we reach millions of people over the course of a year.

But on our website, we can reach millions of people in a matter of days. But I think they're different things. And one of the questions we face as a society at large is, what kind of lives do we want to lead? And how much social interaction versus virtual engagement constitutes a healthy, happy human experience? And it's no different in an art museum than it is in our own lives. We can spend all of our time at home on our computer doing what we're doing now, which is enormously valuable to have a podcast that will connect to anyone who's interested in this subject. But it's different than sitting in a room together with people and engaging with them in ways that one can't do virtually. That is the same with the history of art and with the museum profession.

So I think the future will have us increasingly sophisticated in how we tell stories and how we rely on technology. But I think people will still be drawn to come to the museum to see objects and to see other people together experiencing those objects in something like a social phenomenon.

How do you think about enhancing the experience of the museum? What's next? One of our central ambitions is genuinely to fulfill the foundational mission of the museum when it was founded in 1870, and that is to be of service and connected to everyone who might be interested in what we do, to be as welcoming and accessible institution as we can be. And that is harder to do than it sounds, because for many people who have never been here, this is an intimidating place. They're not sure how to navigate it. They're not even sure if they're welcome inside. It's not always so obvious to people that they are. So at the center of the future, I think, is continuing to expand the audiences that we serve,

the collections that we present and study in ways that shows increasingly the interconnectedness of the human experience. That paradoxically, the more we gather the works of art of disparate cultures around the world and across time, the more we learn through careful study and presentation that those cultures are interconnected, that we have more in common with ancient Egypt or the Benin people or you name it than we might otherwise think. And one goal of museums is to create stronger global communities where we have a shared understanding, or at least an allied understanding, of what it means to be human in the world today. And that requires a higher level of understanding and appreciation of that which is unfamiliar to us. So museums can do that. Therefore, I think the overarching objective is thoughtful, continued expansion of mission, expansion of audiences in ways that is respectful and that continues to allow the human story to be told in increasing levels of detail and richness across all of time.

Before I ask for the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today, is there anything else you'd like to mention that you haven't already touched upon? Well, I think I will just say one thing, and that is in my years as the CEO of the Met, these have certainly been years of great debate and discussion around museums. But I think that is a sign of how much people love them, that people don't debate and discuss things they don't care very much about, but that museums really play an essential role in our societies. Every city, every town has them. And I'm enormously proud of the fact that I work within an industry that does so much good in our community every day. They are beloved, but they also need to change with time. And I think that

will come. What are the three takeaways, Dan, that you would like to leave the audience with today? The first is that museums live for and are in service to the community. Everyone owns museums, and everyone should feel comfortable to get involved at levels that interest them, that we're here for everyone, and we don't get better until people engage. The second is that museums are a source of powerful community and peace. That is to say that museums are a force for good in the world because they enrich our understanding of that which is different. And the shared experience of going to museums helps people to understand and appreciate more of the world they inhabit, even areas of difference.

And the third is that museums live in the moment, for sure. We are here to serve the moment, but we're also obligated to be in service to all of time. We are perpetual institutions that are intended to be here forever. So we have to pay attention to what's going on outside the window today and be in service to what needs there are. But we also should keep our eye on the long term and make sure that we will be here for future generations. Ben, this has been great. Thank you so much.

And thank you for your leadership of the Met. Thanks so much. It's been a pleasure to be with you. If you enjoyed today's episode and would like to receive the show notes or get new fresh weekly episodes, be sure to sign up for our newsletter at 3takeaways.com

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