Annenberg Interruptus

It sounded, at first, almost too good to be true: a benefactor gives $40 million to America's greatest museum, no strings visible, to "record man's total accomplishment" in culture, "probably in the form of video cassette or disc." Such was the pharaonic enterprise entailed in the Fine Arts Center of the Annenberg School of Communications, to be housed inside New York's Metropolitan Museum in a new wing built, equipped and funded for ten years by ex-President Nixon's ambassador to Britain, Publisher (TV Guide, Seventeen) Walter H. Annenberg. It would be run by the Met's director, Thomas Hoving, who announced his retirement from the museum last November.

There were heady visions of a future filled with microchips and laser holography, in which, according to Hoving, "an entire gallery of masterpieces ... will be produced in three dimensions on your wall. This will be done in such a way that the original and the facsimile could not be told apart." Plans for encyclopedic TV series modeled on Kenneth Clark's Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man hung in the air. All of this would be distributed for various TV and educational outlets around the U.S. It might have been the largest coup of Hoving's career, but last week it turned out to be a huge Indian gift. Enraged by city officials' criticisms of the plan, Annenberg, after taking out an imperious warning ad in the New York Times, canceled the project. He made it plain that the center would be built elsewhere--perhaps, a rumor had it, in San Francisco.

The criticisms were several--some minor, others not. Some of the Met's trustees and curators had deep reservations about any project that would shift the museum's activity away from the display and study of original works of art toward mass reproduction and film. The "semiautonomous" status of the center, housed in the museum but not under its administrative control, created misgivings; and not everyone felt happy about the idea of a vast personal monument to Annenberg. But the official obstacle was the center's use of public land. Due to restrictions on the Met's expansion into Central Park, the Annenberg Center could only be housed in the museum by using up space--which Hoving had previously announced to be "essential" for exhibitions--inside the not-yet-built southwest wing.

Backstage Shuffle. More than half the Met's collection of Western European arts and European paintings is inaccessible to the public. The new wing would solve this problem, and on that basis New York Parks Administrator August Heckscher in 1971 approved the building plan for the expansion on Central Park land. Now it turned out that three-quarters of the southwest wing would not be used to display works of art at all; occupied by Annenberg's project, it would be closed to the public--a backstage shuffle that Hoving managed to keep secret almost to the last moment.

Some city officials, headed by City Council President Paul O'Dwyer and Council Member Carter Burden, saw no reason why the center should be housed inside the Met at all. "The museum's furtive use of city land totally violates the new land-use regulations in the new city charter," snapped O'Dwyer. an ex-of-ficio trustee of the museum. O'Dwyer and Burden suggested other sites in New York, but to no avail: Annenberg wanted the Metropolitan or nothing. Why would he not consider another New York location? "Because," Hoving said bitterly on the eve of his departure for Europe last week, "he doesn't want to go through the city nonsense all over again, and he feels that the climate of this city is not conducive to high creative endeavor--and I couldn't agree with him more."

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