Go, Tom, Go.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has appointed Tom Campbell as the new Director. YAY!!

I worked with Tom when he very first arrived at the Met and I was on the team that helped make the Ratti Center happen in its final stages.

He is a scholarly and tenacious guy and a GREAT pick. A real 'dark horse," though. Few on the inside thought he was one of the very strongest candidates, I think -- maybe they were being coy.

Right now, I am most thrilled in how it is an endorsement of young leadership.

May 17, 2008 2:40 pm US/Eastern
New Leader Is Youngest In NAACP History
NEW YORK (AP) ― The NAACP chose 35-year-old activist and former news executive Ben Jealous as its president Saturday, making him the youngest leader in the 99-year history of the nation's largest civil rights organization.


Daniel Sokatch Named CEO of Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties
April 9, 2008
(San Francisco, CA) – Daniel J. Sokatch has been named Chief Executive Officer of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties (JCF) effective July 15, 2008...Sokatch, 40, graduated from Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy with an MA in Law and Diplomacy, earned his J.D., magna cum laude, from Boston College Law School, and a BA in History from Brandeis University.

The Debate about What This Means for Museums Will Continue

The Wall Street Journal's By Eric Gibson writes:

"By extension, the appointment shows that the board itself understands what a museum is supposed to be. It isn't just a pleasure dome, though it should be a source of pleasure. Nor is it a place where the public must be, to use some of today's trendy argot, "challenged"—force-fed unpalatable or shocking art like the inmates at some Communist re-education camp because the cultural commissars think it's good for them. The Met's trustees clearly see the art museum, instead, as an institution that society relies on to preserve, present and interpret its cultural patrimony in order to answer the questions famously posed by Paul Gauguin in his 1897-98 painting "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?"

In this regard, perhaps the most revealing passage in yesterday's announcement was not the recitation of Mr. Campbell's scholarly credentials, the list of exhibitions he's organized and his other professional accomplishments, nor the account of his steady upward rise through the ranks. It was board chairman James R. Houghton's praise for "his great passion for art."

that's so weird and misguided, i am not quite sure what to say?...why quote Guaguin's cultural appropriations in the service of this salient line of inquiry? o.k. whatever.

Go, Tom, go.