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You won't find many 69-year-olds out here on the Internet, sniffing out news with the rest of us. But that's exactly how Thomas Hoving, former New York City Parks Commissioner and head of the Metropolitan Museum from 1967 to 1977, spends his days. He likes to think of himself as just another Internet hack trying to break some stories.
In early May, Hoving was named editorial director of artnet.com, a Web site that aims to tell you everything you'd want to know about the art world. It's a great site, in my view -- packed with everything from online art auctions to databases on art prices and artists to an online art magazine. Its biggest drawback: The site is stolid and hard to navigate. Hoving, who followed his stint at the Met by becoming editor of Connoisseur magazine from 1981 to 1990, and who also worked as a correspondent for the ABC-TV news show 20/20, is charged with giving the site some pizzazz and a sense of immediacy. Watch for some fireworks.
Hoving is one of the most controversial figures in the art world. He's opinionated, acerbic, extremely well connected, and is a heat-seeking missile when it comes to controversy. At the Met, his intrigues were endless, and he eventually quit after a tiff with some trustees. In his tell-all memoir of those years, Making the Mummies Dance, he admitted to dallying with prostitutes on an art-hunting trip to Vienna, contended that museums often buy fakes and artifacts illegally spirited out of their countries of origin, and dished up devastating portraits of New York's high and mighty.
"ACIDIC GOO."
I've long savored his gamy physical descriptions of people in Making the Mummies Dance, such as this one of Roland Redmond, former president of the Met, then in his 80s: "His handsome face [was] marred only in his later years by his rheumy eyes, which looked like day-old oysters." In one of Hoving's recent columns for artnet.com, which he has been writing off and on since 1998, he attacked New York Observer art critic Hilton Kramer in these terms: "I read him for amusement. I admire [him] when he's slobbering over something. I get this image of the outer-space creature from Alien, maw pulsating open and closed, dripping a viscous acidic goo that eats away at anything it touches. A cartoon character."
He's also mercurial. In our first phone interview last week, he was quick to note that he has only signed on with artnet as a month-to-month consultant (he says he asked for no options or equity in the company, only a monthly fee). "They can get rid of me at any minute," he says. "I can walk out at any minute." He did this, he says, so as not to upset other staffers. But he quickly raised suspicions that there's already friction. At 8:30 last Friday evening, he called me back and said cryptically that we should talk again before I finished my story.
"You're not leaving artnet, are you?" I asked, somewhat alarmed. "It's possible," he responded. By Monday morning, he was saying he had overreacted to something -- exactly what, he won't say -- and assured me there was only a "remote" possibility that whatever it was could affect this story. Stay tuned.
NEWS HOUND.
I'm guessing Hoving's appointment will lead to new rows with the buttoned-down at artnet. The potential for conflict seems especially high between him and the staff of the online magazine, which attempts to cover the art market objectively. Hoving says the site will remain independent, but staffers may quail anyway at his plans to use news-related profiles and items to promote the site.
"The secret to becoming a connoisseur...is simple," Hoving writes. "You look and look more and look again."
Meanwhile, Hoving's stories and columns will drive the Art Establishment batty. When his name comes up in conversation, art types tend to suddenly want to go off the record before they say something disparaging. One scholar who commented on the record, McAllister Johnson, author of Art History: Its Use and Abuse, sniffed to the Toronto Globe & Mail last November: "He's extremely glib, extremely with-it.... Not at all the sort of person one would want to see writing an introduction [to art appreciation]." That last bit was a backhanded reference to Hoving's 1999 book, Art for Dummies -- part of the Dummies series that seeks to unveil the secrets of everything from art to auto repair and beauty secrets.
Hoving's initial plans for artnet seem sensible enough. He says he's devising ways to redesign the site so there are more links and interconnections between its sections, such as the auction site, the magazine, and the online bookstore. He plans to write his column more regularly -- and chase down news as well. "I love hard-breaking news," he says. "We're very image-driven so I went out and got myself a [digital] camera, and have my own Adobe photo-editing [software]. I take them the way I want, crop them the way I want, and get 'em in there."
POPULIST STREAK.
He's also tying in the site's activities with current events. For instance, when front-page news broke recently in The New York Times of an apparently fake painting by Richard Diebenkorn being auctioned for a hefty price on eBay, Hoving quickly slapped up a note explaining why such a fake could never get by artnet's expert vetting process. Artnet also featured a real Diebenkorn print on its auction site, which sold for $34,100 -- $3,050 more than the print sold for at a Sotheby's auction a year ago.
But this is not a man who's likely to stop with mundane measures. He notes that his father, who once owned Tiffany's, was known as "the prince of retailing." Hoving inherited some of his father's flair. At the Met, he was widely credited with pioneering the razzmatazz marketing techniques and blockbuster shows that are now imitated by museums worldwide.
He also has a populist streak that I really like. Art snobs were appalled that a former head of the august Met would pen downmarket books like Art for Dummies and The Greatest Works of Art of Western Civilization, a 1997 work in which Hoving sought to distill art history into 111 truly great works.
MAKING THE GRADE.
Of course, such books are fatuous in a sense. But I love Hoving's insistence on demystifying art and his endlessly repeated contention that anyone can be an art expert if they simply look at enough of it. "The secret to becoming a connoisseur, someone who recognizes artistic quality in all its subtle variations, is simple," Hoving writes in Dummies. "You look and look more and look again. That's the best the pros can do. The secret is being saturated in art."
This attitude informs the best of Hoving's columns at artnet. For instance, when Phillips Auctioneers recently held a much-vaunted auction of Impressionist works, Hoving was the only critic I know of who simply went to the advance showing of the work and recorded his gut reactions. His verdict: A few of the works were top-notch, but most of them were overpriced. No one who read his column was surprised when many of the works didn't sell -- and the auction only raised about $40 million, instead of the $80 million some were predicting. Many of the works he panned were the ones that failed to find a buyer.
I don't know how this attitude will translate into changes at artnet.com. And I have doubts that Hoving will last long in the job. But three cheers to him for trying. If he succeeds, one of the best art sites on the Net is about to get more interesting -- and a lot more controversial.
Copyright 2000 , by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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