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When I was considering a career in the art world,
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I took a course in London,
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and one of my supervisors was this irascible Italian
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called Pietro, who drank too much,
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smoked too much and swore much too much.
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But he was a passionate teacher,
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and I remember one of our earlier classes with him,
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he was projecting images on the wall,
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asking us to think about them,
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and he put up an image of a painting.
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It was a landscape with figures, semi-dressed,
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drinking wine. There was a nude woman
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in the lower foreground, and on the hillside in the back,
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there was a figure of the mythological god Bacchus,
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and he said, "What is this?"
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And I -- no one else did, so I put up my hand, and I said,
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"It's a Bacchanal by Titian."
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He said, "It's a what?"
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I thought maybe I'd pronounced it wrong.
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"It's a Bacchanal by Titian."
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He said, "It's a what?"
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I said, "It's a Bacchanal by Titian." (Laughter)
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He said, "You boneless bookworm!
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It's a fucking orgy!"
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(Laughter)
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As I said, he swore too much.
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There was an important lesson for me in that.
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Pietro was suspicious of formal art training,
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art history training, because he feared
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that it filled people up with jargon, and then they just
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classified things rather than looking at them,
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and he wanted to remind us that all art was once contemporary,
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and he wanted us to use our eyes,
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and he was especially evangelical about this message,
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because he was losing his sight.
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He wanted us to look and ask basic questions of objects.
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What is it? How is it made? Why was it made?
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How is it used?
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And these were important lessons to me when
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I subsequently became a professional art historian.
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My kind of eureka moment came a few years later,
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when I was studying the art of the courts of Northern Europe,
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and of course it was very much discussed in terms of
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the paintings and the sculptures
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and the architecture of the day.
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But as I began to read historical documents
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and contemporary descriptions,
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I found there was a kind of a missing component,
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for everywhere I came across descriptions of tapestries.
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Tapestries were ubiquitous between the Middle Ages
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and, really, well into the 18th century,
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and it was pretty apparent why.
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Tapestries were portable. You could roll them up,
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send them ahead of you, and in the time
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it took to hang them up, you could transform a cold,
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dank interior into a richly colored setting.
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Tapestries effectively provided a vast canvas
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on which the patrons of the day could depict the heroes
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with whom they wanted to be associated,
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or even themselves,
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and in addition to that, tapestries were hugely expensive.
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They required scores of highly skilled weavers
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working over extended periods of time
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with very expensive materials -- the wools, the silks,
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even gold and silver thread.
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So, all in all, in an age when the visual image
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of any kind was rare, tapestries were an incredibly potent
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form of propaganda.
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Well, I became a tapestry historian.
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In due course, I ended up as a curator
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at the Metropolitan Museum, because I saw the Met
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as one of the few places where I could organize
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really big exhibitions about the subject
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I cared so passionately about.
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And in about 1997, the then-director Philippe de Montebello
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gave me the go-ahead to organize an exhibition
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for 2002. We normally have these very long lead-in times.
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It wasn't straightforward. It's no longer a question
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of chucking a tapestry in the back of a car.
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They have to be wound on huge rollers,
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shipped in oversized freighters.
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Some of them are so big we had, to get them into the museum,
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we had to take them up the great steps at the front.
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We thought very hard about how to present this
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unknown subject to a modern audience:
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the dark colors to set off the colors that remained
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in objects that were often faded;
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the placing of lights to bring out the silk and the gold thread;
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the labeling.
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You know, we live in an age where we are so used
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to television images and photographs,
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a one-hit image. These were big, complex things,
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almost like cartoons with multiple narratives.
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We had to draw our audience in, get them to slow down,
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to explore the objects.
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There was a lot of skepticism. On the opening night,
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I overheard one of the senior members of staff saying,
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"This is going to be a bomb."
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But in reality, in the course of the coming weeks and months,
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hundreds of thousands of people came to see the show.
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The exhibition was designed to be an experience,
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and tapestries are hard to reproduce in photographs.
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So I want you to use your imaginations,
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thinking of these wall-high objects,
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some of them 10 meters wide,
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depicting lavish court scenes with courtiers and dandies
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who would look quite at home in the pages of the fashion press today,
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thick woods with hunters crashing through the undergrowth
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in pursuit of wild boars and deer,
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violent battles with scenes of fear and heroism.
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I remember taking my son's school class. He was eight at the time,
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and all the little boys, they kind of -- you know, they were little boys,
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and then the thing that caught their attention
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was in one of the hunting scenes there was a dog
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pooping in the foreground — (Laughter) —
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kind of an in-your-face joke by the artist.
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And you can just imagine them.
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But it brought it alive to them. I think they suddenly saw
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that these weren't just old faded tapestries.
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These were images of the world in the past,
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and that it was the same for our audience.
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And for me as a curator, I felt proud. I felt I'd shifted the needle a little.
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Through this experience that could only be created
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in a museum, I'd opened up the eyes of my audience --
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historians, artists, press, the general public --
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to the beauty of this lost medium.
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A few years later, I was invited to be the director
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of the museum, and after I got over that --
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"Who, me? The tapestry geek? I don't wear a tie!" --
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I realized the fact: I believe passionately in that
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curated museum experience.
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We live in an age of ubiquitous information,
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and sort of "just add water" expertise,
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but there's nothing that compares with the presentation
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of significant objects in a well-told narrative,
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what the curator does, the interpretation of a complex,
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esoteric subject, in a way that retains the integrity
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of the subject, that makes it -- unpacks it
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for a general audience.
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And that, to me, today, is now the challenge and the fun
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of my job, supporting the vision of my curators,
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whether it's an exhibition of Samurai swords,
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early Byzantine artifacts, Renaissance portraits,
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or the show we heard mentioned earlier,
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the McQueen show, with which we enjoyed
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so much success last summer.
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That was an interesting case.
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In the late spring, early summer of 2010, shortly after
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McQueen's suicide,
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our curator of costume, Andrew Bolton, came to see me,
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and said, "I've been thinking of doing a show on McQueen,
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and now is the moment. We have to, we have to do it fast."
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It wasn't easy. McQueen had worked throughout his career
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with a small team of designers and managers
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who were very protective of his legacy,
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but Andrew went to London and worked with them
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over the summer and won their confidence, and that of
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the designers who created his amazing fashion shows,
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which were works of performance art in their own right,
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and we proceeded to do something at the museum,
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I think, we've never done before.
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It wasn't just your standard installation.
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In fact, we ripped down the galleries to recreate
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entirely different settings, a recreation of his first studio,
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a hall of mirrors,
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a curiosity box,
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a sunken ship, a burned-out interior,
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with videos and soundtracks that ranged from
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operatic arias to pigs fornicating.
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And in this extraordinary setting, the costumes
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were like actors and actresses, or living sculptures.
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It could have been a train wreck.
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It could have looked like shop windows on Fifth Avenue
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at Christmas, but because of the way that Andrew
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connected with the McQueen team, he was channeling
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the rawness and the brilliance of McQueen,
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and the show was quite transcendant,
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and it became a phenomenon in its own right.
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By the end of the show, we had people queuing
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for four or five hours to get into the show,
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but no one really complained.
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I heard over and over again, "Wow, that was worth it.
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It was a such a visceral, emotive experience."
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Now, I've described two very immersive exhibitions,
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but I also believe that collections, individual objects,
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can also have that same power.
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The Met was set up not as a museum of American art,
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but of an encyclopedic museum,
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and today, 140 years later, that vision
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is as prescient as ever,
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because, of course, we live in a world of crisis,
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of challenge, and we're exposed to it
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through the 24/7 newsreels.
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It's in our galleries that we can unpack the civilizations,
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the cultures, that we're seeing the current manifestation of.
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Whether it's Libya, Egypt, Syria,
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it's in our galleries that we can explain
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and give greater understanding.
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I mean, our new Islamic galleries are a case in point,
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opened 10 years, almost to the week, after 9/11.
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I think for most Americans, knowledge of the Islamic world
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was pretty slight before 9/11, and then it was thrust upon us
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in one of America's darkest hours,
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and the perception was through the polarization
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of that terrible event.
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Now, in our galleries, we show 14 centuries
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of the development of different Islamic cultures
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across a vast geographic spread,
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and, again, hundreds of thousands of people have come
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to see these galleries since they opened last October.
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I'm often asked, "Is digital media replacing the museum?"
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and I think those numbers are a resounding rejection
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of that notion. I mean, don't get me wrong,
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I'm a huge advocate of the Web.
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It gives us a way of reaching out to audiences
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around the globe, but nothing replaces the authenticity
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of the object presented with passionate scholarship.
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Bringing people face to face with our objects
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is a way of bringing them face to face with people
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across time, across space, whose lives may have been
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very different to our own, but who, like us,
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had hopes and dreams, frustrations and achievements
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in their lives. And I think this is a process
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that helps us better understand ourselves,
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helps us make better decisions about where we're going.
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The Great Hall at the Met is one of the great portals of the world,
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awe-inspiring, like a medieval cathedral.
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From there, you can walk in any direction
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to almost any culture.
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I frequently go out into the hall and the galleries
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and I watch our visitors coming in.
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Some of them are comfortable. They feel at home.
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They know what they're looking for.
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Others are very uneasy. It's an intimidating place.
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They feel that the institution is elitist.
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I'm working to try and break down that sense of that elitism.
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I want to put people in a contemplative frame of mind,
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where they're prepared to be a little bit lost, to explore,
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to see the unfamiliar in the familiar,
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or to try the unknown.
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Because for us, it's all about bringing them face to face
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with great works of art,
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capturing them at that moment of discomfort,
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when the inclination is kind of to reach for your iPhone,
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your Blackberry, but to create a zone
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where their curiosity can expand.
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And whether it's in the expression of a Greek sculpture
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that reminds you of a friend,
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or a dog pooping in the corner of a tapestry,
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or, to bring it back to my tutor Pietro,
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those dancing figures
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who are indeed knocking back the wine,
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and that nude figure in the left foreground.
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Wow. She is a gorgeous embodiment of youthful sexuality.
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In that moment, our scholarship can tell you
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that this is a bacchanal,
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but if we're doing our job right,
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and you've checked the jargon at the front door,
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trust your instinct.
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You know it's an orgy.
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Thank you. (Applause)
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(Applause)