The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in choosing Tate Modern chief curator Sheena Wagstaff to split off and power up its long-becalmed modern and contemporary art department, has made an inspired choice. She replaces Gary Tinterow, decamped for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in December after years of keeping the contemporary collection a sleepy adjunct to his core area of interest, 19th-century paintings. The 19th-century division will now be handled separately, by curator Keith Christiansen. Wagstaff has both the credentials and the opportunity to usher in a whole new era — the contemporary era — at the nation's most revered art institution.
A 55-year-old career curator who began at Tate in 1998 as a top staffer involved in creating Tate Britain, Wagstaff — the fourth Britisher to be recruited by Met director Thomas Campbell — transitioned to Tate Modern after it was created in 2000. There, she pioneered its world-renowned Turbine Hall commissions and organized shows on artists from Jeff Wall to Roy Lichtenstein, whose forthcoming retrospective she co-curated. In the New York Times story announcing her appointment, the curator stayed mum about her plans, other than to say she wanted to place the museum “in the vanguard of reinventing a new understanding of what art means, having a dialogue with the past and the present, the most vital conversation we can have today.”
Happily, she's going to have convenient laboratory for this reinvention: come 2015, the Met will take over the Whitney's Marcel Breuer-designed building on East 75th Street, a "very exciting" move that Campbell says will provide "space to show Modern and contemporary art in the context of our encyclopedic collections.” Moreover, the Met is considering an overhaul of the current home of its Modern and contemporary collection, the oddly-laid-out Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, which opened in 1987 and is somehow redolent of an even earlier era (think "Annie Hall").
As a way of welcoming her aboard, here a few suggestions for how she can bring the Met's contemporary division up to the stature of its commanding historical programming — while claiming a unique and appropriately august identity to distinguish it from its superior peers at MoMA, the Whitney, and other cutting-edge New York institutions without playing an embarrassing game of catch-up.
1. PLAY TO YOUR STRENGTHS
Some institutions, like the New Museum, are at their best when they introduce unknown talents to the world. The Met is at its best in terms of contemporary art when it carves living artists into the totem pole of art history, contextualizing them in a considered, scholarly way — as in the Met's canonical 2009 "Pictures Generation" show, its 2010 Richard Serra "Drawings" show (which got a powerful stealth assist from the proximity of the museum's Egyptian collection downstairs), and the Betty Woodman vases retrospective in 2006. Shows like last year's "Reconfiguring an African Icon," showing ancient African masks alongside contemporary sculptures that pay homage to that tradition, have recently been using this institutional strength in an extraordinarily intriguing way — and one sensitive to the thorny issues of "Primitivism" and the legacy of colonialism, too. The Breuer building, with its brutal neutral walls and hulking spaces, would be an ideal venue to continue experimenting with collapsing the temporal gaps between old and new art, pointing viewers toward a less hieratic way of looking at art that's native to our Internet-flattened age. Massimiliano Gioni's 2010 Gwangju Biennale made an enormous splash by bringing this approach of historical mix-and-match to bear on the large-scale exhibition format, and the planned Frieze Masters art fair promises to advance it into the commercial sphere. The Met could do it better than anyone else.
2. GO GLOBAL
Take the above cross-temporal approach and apply it across culture — it worked from Picasso, when he placed ancient Iberian statues (stolen from the Louvre) alongside Japanese prints and contemporary works in his Bateau-Lavoir studio, and it would work for the rest of us too. Wagstaff, who is a founding board member of the Middle Eastern cultural journal Bidoun, and who "conceived an innovative model of small-scale exhibitions based on bilateral research exchanges" while at Tate Modern that partnered with organizations from Kabul to Mexico City, seems to have something like this in mind. “The global context is increasingly important to all of us as we live in an increasingly complex world, and contemporary art is a great enabler to make sense of that world,” she told the Times.
3. THINK BIG
As for the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, why not use its restructuring to rectify an aching lack in the New York City art landscape: aside from MoMA's soaring atrium, there is no space for large-scale installations here that comes close to Turbine Hall, a civic treasure in London that both brings together its citizens (remember Olafur Eliasson's sun?) and generates tremendous press attention for whatever artist gets shown there. At the Met, what better way to signal the seriousness of its commitment to contemporary art than to create a glassed-in vaulted space, a twin to the one encasing the Temple of Dendur, that could be given over to the most ambitious living artists? And who knows… if a sponsor could be found to fund the project, like Unilever does in London, it could generate even more money for the museum than all those gaudy Temple of Dendur galas. (As long as the Whitney doesn't do this first with their planned Renzo Piano-designed headquarters downtown, that is.)
4. DON'T BE SHY
Back when Henry Geldzahler was the Met's first curator for 20th century art, he threw pot-smoke-clouded opening parties that drew the downtown scene and displayed art — famously James Rosenquist's giant-scaled "F-111" — that scandalized the patrician classes while drawing crucial attention to what was then called "advanced art." Perhaps the parties could be toned down a notch, but the Met should not be afraid to let its freak flag fly. Instead of showing Damien Hirst's shark over a decade after it lost its bite, or putting Jeff Koons's puppies on the roof, the museum could use its historical rep as a pedestal to show new work that shakes preconceptions about the canon, and prompts reconsiderations. After all, there's nothing so shocking that a few minutes of quiet time in the Chinese Garden Court couldn't cure.