A day at the MET

Say one thing about Americans, say they are thorough. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a gigantic compendium of the arts of the human species. It combines within one building the most disparate testimonies of human creativity, from early craft tools of the nomadic Egypt of six millennia ago, to 20th century totems from living oceanic tribes, from greek and roman pottery and sculpture, to middle age european artwork, from pre-columbian american jewellery, to contemporary and modern art from all corners of the globe.

The MET plays a role of teacher, providing you with the tools to understanding how civilisations evolved their way of expressing themselves and narrating their everyday life, how they established a contact with the divine throughout the eras, and how this all gave birth, in a relatively small part of the world, to an entirely new way of understanding and creating art. 

The Queen Mother Iyoba pendant mask
(16th century)

But at the end of the day, the MET is a museum, and when you have gone through its educational process, the MET is an incredible archive of human artistic creation. Of the 26 paintings that Vermeer created in his whole life, 5 are in a single room on the second floor of the MET, accompanied by Rembrandt and other masters of the chiaroscuro. Gigantic canvasses by Pollock, Rothko or Ellsworth Kelly take ownership of entire walls, while El Greco, da Messina o Tiziano fill rooms with colours, shapes and light.

We leave with the feeling that indeed, someone should take on the challenge of cataloguing the greatest achievements of culture and creativity. The MET promises to do just that, and delivers with vigour. Maybe it is a task that only a country founded on the idea of cultures meeting and joining, carrying over oceans their baggages of ideas, aesthetic vocabulary and traditions, can accomplish successfully. And maybe they're the only ones with the guts to rebuild an Egyptian temple OUTSIDE the walls of your museum in the middle of the most expensive real estate in the world…

The greatest european museums, while in their own right great repositories of art, don't come even close to achieving something similar, be it because they only focus on a subset of artistic history (Italian museums and their utter refusal to consider anything younger than a couple of centuries as art come to mind), or because they believe that empty space is a bad thing (the Louvre is the best example of what a museum should NOT look like in this respect), or simply by lack of space and money compared to this american giant.

The Temple of Dendur, in the MET greenhouse directed towards Central Park

The result is something that gives me hope for humankind. This museum, which is a physical embodiment of the encyclopaedia of arts, proves that there exists an effort to explain, demonstrate, maintain and exemplify our achievements, and does it on a "pay what you want" basis. Because beauty belongs to everybody, and everybody should be able to afford a visit through its history.

Gold figure pendant from northern Colombia (10th-16th century)