From Monet to Madonna

Autumn is hardening into winter along Huntington Avenue, and what was a steady drizzle is freezing into an icy mist. The Indian is in a cage, and they're packing the boats up off the front lawn, and the Museum of Fine Arts - on its own, as grim and forbidding a piece of old Boston as were any of the bloodless Puritan founders - is looking less and less by the moment like a West Yarmouth marina. The boats - racing yachts owned by billionaire William I. Koch - have been stopping foot traffic along the sidewalk since they were installed in August as part of an exhibit entitled "Things I Love." If you browsed the plaques on the wall, you learned that Mr. Koch, a longtime MFA patron, also was partial to expensive wine, the head of Dionysus, historic firearms (including the revolver with which Robert Ford, the coward, plugged Jesse James), and the works of both Frederic Remington and Joan Miro. But it was the yachts that stopped people. It was the yachts that people came to sketch, right there on the front lawn, surrounding Cyrus Dallin's famous bronze statue Appeal to the Great Spirit, which spent the entire fall looking very much as though its Indian had been hired as the official starter of an America's Cup trial. But, today, the yachts are being packed and moved, and the Indian is surrounded by green mesh fencing to prevent any untoward encounters with seagoing vessels.

"It's a major engineering operation," muses Malcolm Rogers from his office overlooking the MFA's Calderwood courtyard. "It's really quite something."

Rogers, 57, has been the director of the MFA for a little more than a decade. In that time, he has placed a more indelible personal stamp on the MFA than almost any of his predecessors. Brought in to revitalize a stagnant institution, Rogers spent the next 10 years throwing the venerable MFA into the midst of controversy, almost all of it taking place at the perilous intersection of art and commerce, where nasty collisions have been occurring ever since the Renaissance, when the masters of that time became hired decorators in the service of a militarized papacy. The yachts - and everything else that Bill Koch so loves - were only the most recent things that Rogers brought into the MFA, to the consternation of his critics, who see him turning the place into an unholy combination of an ATM and a Hard Rock Cafe. Others say he is just responding to the times.

"The MFA, like all museums, is spending a lot of human and financial resources on identifying ways museums can be of greater service," says Jill Medvedow, director of Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art. "Their economic impact is being studied for the first time."

Since his appointment in 1994, Rogers has brought into the MFA Ralph Lauren's cars and Les Paul's guitars and Herb Ritts's photos of Madonna. He has sent Monets to Vegas. Moreover, he has brought in a management style that his most fervent critics say is far more suited to the average corporate shark tank than an institution like the MFA. For himself, Rogers is feisty and unapologetic, and whether or not he has sought deliberately to court controversy, he clearly relishes it.

"When I came to America," Rogers says, after grinning and chiding "your newspaper" for what he feels has been unfair treatment of his stewardship of the MFA, "people didn't want the job [of museum director] anymore. You weren't just a curator choosing art, choosing the exhibitions anymore. You had to be a fund-raiser. You had to have expertise in PR, in marketing. You had to talk to politicians. You had to know a good deal more about the law and about human resources. You had to be an administrator and an accountant, a CEO, and you had to be utterly charming.

"Controversy can be a very creative thing around the arts. There's a very, very strange double standard in that people will accept truly extraordinary manifestations of what's called 'contemporary art,' but won't accept that a yacht or a car can be art as well. People are a little bit afraid of showing pleasure in simple, direct things and being thought not serious enough."

Rogers is impatient with what he considers to be the elitist aspects of the criticism of his tenure at the MFA. He is a short, peppery man, a former secondary school track athlete who lost 25 pounds within the last few years. Following him through the museum requires a certain level of attention. The man corners exceedingly well. He has turned now into one of the museum's older areas - its collection of ancient Greek and Roman art. He stops before a display case containing several Greek vases on which various naked people are doing various things.

"I've been accused of being too concerned about popular culture," he says with a chuckle. "But look at these. At one time, these were popular culture. They were on somebody's shelf, and they have scenes on them that are extraordinarily vulgar."

By conventional business standards, Rogers's tenure at the MFA has been a success. Attendance and membership have risen since he's been in charge, and the museum recently broke ground on what will be a massive, $500 million expansion, a project that will place at the MFA's granite heart a glass courtyard not dissimilar in spirit to I.M. Pei's glass pyramid that marks the entrance to the Louvre. The Ritts exhibition in 1996 brought a quarter-million visitors into the MFA, and the "Art of the Guitar" drew more than 140,000 to see instruments ranging from medieval lutes to axes swung by Hendrix and Aerosmith. The trustees seem pleased. Rogers's salary now exceeds $500,000 a year.

More than that, Rogers has brought into the museum - roughly, say his detractors - a staff that shares his vision for the place. For example, in the fall of 2004, Rogers hired away from MIT an enthusiastic young concert programmer named Dan Hirsch to run a popular music program at the MFA that's brought rock and world music into the place and has become one of the most popular innovations of Rogers's tenure. "When I sat down to interview here," Hirsch says, "I definitely sensed an active interest in attracting new audiences, younger audiences into the MFA."

But at what cost? Rogers's embrace of the modern, and his equally unapologetic embrace of the commercial, has prompted questions elsewhere in the arts community as to whether, one day soon, behind the counter at the museum's luxurious gift shop, one might be able to purchase for oneself a piece of the museum's soul.

SO, NOT TO PUT TOO FINE A POINT ON IT, what is art anyway?

Take your time. The question has caused an uproar likely ever since some sensitive hunter-gatherer first painted a bison on the wall of a cave in France. The argument has persisted stubbornly, the old often the virulent enemy of the new, until what was new becomes old enough. For example, in 1874, to demonstrate what they maintained was a new spirit of artistic freedom, an unruly passel of Parisian artists hung an exhibit that was so roundly unpopular that they all might have starved but for some wealthy individual patrons. One of the artists was Monet, whose Art is now so indisputably Fine that it's virtually the MFA's institutional logo.

So what is art, then?

Is it that which sells tickets, and posters, and umbrellas with water lilies on them? Is something reproduced on an umbrella still art, or is it just an umbrella? Is it anything that gets hung in a museum? A painting? A wine bottle, even one of Bill Koch's antiquated empties?

Ultimately, this always has been a battle over language. In the Museum of Fine Arts under the directorship of Malcolm Rogers, the primary debate seems to be over how Rogers has sought to find the answer to the question in the vocabulary and the language of commerce. Museum exhibits - whether it's the treasures of King Tut or the "science" of Star Wars or antique shootin'irons - have become appointment destinations, much in the same way The Lion King is. Large, splashy exhibits require large, splashy funding, often from large, splashy corporations. Corporate officers have started appearing more frequently among museum boards of trustees. Personality reigns in a celebrity-driven age, whether that is expressed by Herb Ritts's pictures of Madonna or through one billionaire's love of racing yachts.

"Some of the things that Bill collects are not conventional art museum stuff," explains George Shackelford, the MFA curator who was in charge of the Koch exhibit. "They show the full spectrum of this individual as a collector and, to some extent, as a personality. The personality surrounding great art is really quite interesting."

Ultimately, the oldest question of all - What is art? - is finding new answers in a new language, and, because of that, the critics of Rogers's tenure at the MFA occasionally seem to be arguing out of another, gentler age, and doing so in a language nobody speaks anymore. They can sound as if they've walked into a South End bistro and begun ordering food in Latin.

"THERE'S A TENDENCY not to understand that museums are places where we're invited to think, and not just to be emolliently entertained," says Ivan Gaskell, curator of paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts for Harvard University's art museums. "Those amazing boats in front of the MFA, the guitars, there's nothing wrong with those at all. It's the engagement we're being invited to have with those things. Is it asking us to think? Or is it telling us to go buy things? . . . It's when a museum becomes a trade show that you run into problems."

Bob Jacobsen, the curator of Asian art for the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, says: "We understand that, at least in this country, there's a lot of money spent on leisure time, and fine arts have shifted from being marvelous just for teaching purposes to where now it's right out there competing with Disneyland and Las Vegas."

This redefinition of the museum's place in the culture brought to bear different pressures on the museum director, who had to maintain a museum's traditional mission in the face of radically altered cultural imperatives. The director's constituencies now were made up of more than the curatorial staff of the individual museum and the museum's regular patrons. The director now was dealing with the wider corporate world, and with the kind of patrons whom sports teams often refer to as "casual fans," people drawn to a team because it is winning or, in this case, drawn to a specific exhibit and not to the museum itself. Once, a museum director could be merely a curator in charge of other curators. However, as museums found themselves forced to compete more directly for a shrinking discretionary dollar, and as more and more nonprofit institutions began to hand over their direction to the professional management class, the job of a museum director had evolved within it both considerable political pressures and conventional management responsibilities.

"Museum directors and boards are under tremendous pressure to be businesses," says Gaskell. "I don't know to what extent that pressure is self-generated. Boards are going in the direction of bringing people on to help them financially. The trade-off is these people bring commercial concerns with them. The trade-off is that certain values get lost. Once those values are undermined, then you can't pretend you're doing the same thing."

Perhaps the most pivotal - certainly, the noisiest - moment came in 1998, when New York's venerable Guggenheim Museum played host to an exhibit titled "The Art of the Motorcycle." Guggenheim Foundation director Thomas Krens, who arranged for and mounted the show, argued that the motorcycle was a "perfect metaphor for the 20th century." His critics charged, with some accuracy, that the exhibit had been mounted to produce buzz for buzz's sake.

Critic Jed Perl, writing in The New Republic, said that the exhibit represented "bottom-feeding for the fashion-conscious . . . . There has never been a more pathological display of institutional least-common-denominator braggadocio."

Rogers disagrees. "I don't think that exhibition was particularly revolutionary," he says. "What caused the revolution was that the press decided to make it revolutionary. It seemed a very traditional exhibition of industrial design, the kind of thing that a design museum wouldn't blink at doing."

Nevertheless, it was a perfect example of the direction in which museums were headed. The Guggenheim later put on an exhibit celebrating the work of fashion designer Giorgio Armani. Shortly thereafter, Armani's company gifted the Guggenheim some $15 million, a coincidence that outraged many in the art world. New York's Museum of Modern Art recently opened an exhibition of the work of the Pixar Animation Studios - bankrolled by someone other than Pixar, for which MOMA was applauded. Figurines from Toy Story and The Incredibles represent the same kind of huge leap into mass popular culture that reached some sort of apogee when the Louvre caved in and agreed to play host for the cast and crew of the movie version of The Da Vinci Code, in which a ritual murder within the museum kicks off the story's (endless) pursuit of the heirs of Mary Magdalene.

"Now, museums are not businesses," Rogers says. "I firmly believe that. Businesses can change their missions. Museums don't change their missions. But we have to be businesslike in all our operations, because the resources are precious.

"My job is much more complicated than most CEO jobs, I believe, because every one of my 'shareholders' in this institution has a different bottom line for this organization."

On June 26, 1994, The New York Times printed a story that knocked the American art world frescoes over teakettles. The newspaper disclosed that not only were 13 museums in the United States without directors but also that some of them were unable even to find candidates for the job. The Times attributed this to fundamental changes in the job's requirements, a dilemma limned most vividly by Robert Buck, then the director of the Brooklyn Museum.

"Directors," Buck told the Times, "are like classy beggars with golden cups."

In the same week that the Times ran this story, Malcolm Rogers took the job as director at the MFA, beating out a small field of candidates that included, as it happened, Robert Buck.

BY THE TIME the Times story appeared, Rogers had been ready for a change for almost a year. He was the deputy director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, and his rise to this point had been both meteoric and quintessentially British. Rogers grew up in a tiny Yorkshire village on a farm where he tended livestock. When he was very young, he was taken to a stately home, where he was enthralled by a portrait of Elizabeth I. He won a scholarship to a small school in the Midlands and then one to Oxford. Later, he developed an academic speciality in the portraiture art of the 16th and 17th centuries. Throughout, he maintained a kind of small-town wariness about what he perceived as the closed world of cultural elites.

"I'm a little old-fashioned," Rogers explains. "It's why I'm so keen on the breadth of influence of a museum. Curators are not our exclusive audience. They are not the sole judges of what the standard of art and form is.

"One of the sad things that happened in the 20th century is that museums became more professionalized, and the profession became judge and jury. What I try to do is return museums to the broad mission that philanthropists founded them for, while sustaining all the intellectual vivacity that curators bring."

In 1983, Rogers was appointed deputy director of the National Portrait Gallery, a museum that is exactly what it says it is - a place exclusively dedicated to pictures of the famous, even if they happen to be people whose fame did not outlive the Tudors. (In criticizing what she sees as Rogers's sweet tooth for celebrity, Boston University art historian Patricia Hills shrewdly points out that, after all, at the National Portrait Gallery, Rogers worked exclusively with portraits of celebrities, albeit celebrities from the 1500s and 1600s.) After 10 years at the Portrait Gallery, during which time he was instrumental in a $20 million fundraising campaign to refurbish the entire museum, Rogers expected to be named its director. But in 1993 he was passed over, at least in part because he was considered to be too much of an academic. The decision sparked a heated dispute that spilled over into the British newspapers. "It was," he says, "my first taste of controversy."

Fueled by his indignation at this slight, Rogers looked to America. He pursued the MFA vigorously, even personally contacting the headhunter whom the museum had hired. More than anything else, it was Rogers's enthusiasm for the job that sold him to the headhunter and, ultimately, to the MFA's trustees. At that point, when all major American museums were having trouble finding people to run them, the directorship of the MFA was considered to be a uniquely difficult job.

In the 19th century, the MFA built up a considerable lead on the rest of the country's museums. The local fortunes made in textiles and in paper - and, most especially, in the shipping and commerce that brought local goods to the world - ensured that Boston philanthropy possessed a formidable global reach. It was every bit of a piece with the kind of philanthropy that produced not only the MFA but also the Public Garden and the "promenade" performances of the Boston Symphony - a notion, paternalistic though it might be, that the Right People should do what they could to elevate the sensibilities of the common folk in order to produce a more civil and sophisticated culture.

(That this effect was often produced by robbing, pillaging, and bribing out of their treasures other, less-sophisticated cultures was rarely mentioned.)

The MFA was able to steal a march on the rest of the country's museums in many areas, especially in the antiquities and in Asian art, which the museum championed virtually alone for many years. It also developed an early emphasis on Impressionist painting, enabling the MFA to build up a towering collection by artists like Monet. However, by the time Rogers took the director's job, the museum was losing money, and a kind of musty petrification was setting in. The MFA was old Boston, right down to the regular teas that were held there for suburban matrons, a fine example of one wag's suggested motto for Boston's entire cultural community:

"My dear young man, it simply is not . . . done."

"They had that initial great start," says Jacobsen of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. "Then there was sort of this lull - and Boston wasn't alone in this - where the attitude was, if it's marvelous, you just put it on a wall, and people will flock to it. Pre-World War II, maybe that was even partly true, but we learned that it doesn't quite happen that way anymore. You have to do outreach and marketing."

By the early 1990s, for all the strength that remained in its collections, the MFA as an institution seemed to be floundering in obsolescence and drowning in red ink. By 1994, the museum's deficit was $4.2 million, and layoffs were decimating the staff. To save on heating costs, the great front doors along Huntington Avenue were locked. Malcolm Rogers was an attractive candidate simply because he seemed to want the job so badly.

"One thing was very important," he says. "It was the key to my psychology. One of the reasons I had this opportunity in Boston was because I saw the directorship as a great prize. Americans looked at it as a CEO - are all the conditions right? I just thought, how can one not want to be the director of the MFA?"

The trustees applauded. One of the first things Rogers did was open wide the big front doors.

AT THE START, Rogers was greeted as a breath of fresh air. "In my opinion," says Harvard's Gaskell, "he got off to a terrific start. Opening the front door was a really smart move. The point was made at the time that those doors faced Roxbury, and there's a real statement there. It might be a contrived reading to say that everyone is welcome, but it was a good thing to do right at the beginning. It made his directorship look as though it would be one that was open."

In 1999, however, as part of what he called a reorganization of the museum's curatorial staff, Rogers fired two of the MFA's most respected curators - Jonathan Fairbanks and Anne Poulet. Rogers believed that neither shared his vision for the museum. But what hurt him most, particularly in the art world outside the MFA, was the peremptory way he went about the dismissals. A story circulated - which Rogers took several years to contest - that he had told Fairbanks and Poulet to leave the building by the end of the day, and that he'd sent the museum's security staff to escort them out. This, of course, is standard practice in American business, but in the rarefied precincts of the MFA, well, my dear young man, it simply is not done.

If anything, the firings made Rogers more determined to push forward with his vision, which included not only well-received traditional exhibits involving painters such as Monet and Gauguin, surprisingly charming innovations like "The Art of the Guitar," and the arguable gaucherie of Bill Koch's love objects. They were the invisible energy fueling the vehemence of much of the criticism of his tenure. The firings are the subtext whenever art and commerce try to talk to each other at the MFA. And then Rogers sent Monet to Vegas.

Matthew Hileman is the director of the art gallery at the Bellagio, a sprawling entertainment complex typical of the new "family-friendly" Las Vegas, and approximately as much of a casino as Disneyland is an amusement park.

Rogers always has had a fondness for Vegas, going back to a visit he made at the end of a trip in which he was endeavoring to visit all of the national parks in the Southwest. "Once you've spent a lot of time in rather simple lodging," he says, "you have a yearning for luxury."

His MFA tenure coincided with the triumph in Vegas of moguls like Steve Wynn, who sought to make what was once simply the gangland repository of the sinful id into a vacation destination.

In January 2004, for a fee of what was estimated to be in excess of $1 million, Rogers arranged for the MFA to loan 21 Monets to the Bellagio. "Why I think Boston joined up is that Las Vegas has the broadest, most diverse audience in the world," Hileman says. "On a typical holiday weekend, we'll get people from 49 different countries here." Having reportedly brought in more than $6 million at $15 per ticket, the show succeeded so well, by the standards of both the Bellagio and the MFA, that another show is currently mounted there, this time with 34 paintings from the museum's collection.

"Las Vegas is one of the most wonderful, spectacular, awful creations of the American imagination," Rogers argues. "It seems to me to be rather hypocritical to imply that Las Vegas is this kind of den of iniquity where you can't send art. I mean, the Salvation Army would be criticized if it didn't go to Las Vegas and rattle its collecting box. We're to be criticized for going there? I think saving souls is just the same."

However, it's hard to imagine anything more guaranteed to grate on every raw nerve of Rogers's critics. First of all, they argue, by taking a fee for loaning paintings from a nonprofit institution to a distinctly for-profit enterprise like a casino, Rogers has merely found a new way to make money for the sake of making money. Moreover, beneath much of the criticism is a visceral distaste at the notion that Rogers has sent the MFA's most precious possessions off to a place where they share the billing with phony pirates, fake volcanoes, and Les Folies Bergere atop the many-layered archaeology of American sin.

ON THIS MORNING, Bill Koch's favorite things are leaving behind only white spots on the gallery walls, to be replaced by an exhibition titled "Degas to Picasso: Modern Masters." Indeed, the 2006 schedule of exhibits so far offers no yachts or wine bottles. The MFA will play host to an exhibit of Japanese art and to a showing of portraits by British artist David Hockney. On the surface, it seems as though the museum is getting its serious back on again.

However, if the Koch exhibit - and the Lauren exhibit before it, and the guitars show before that - did nothing else, it lent to the MFA an aspect that the old ideas of fine art were gone, for good or ill, and that almost anything might turn up in the place, or out on the lawn. In moving from the gun that killed Jesse James to the works of Pablo Picasso, on the same walls, we find a rough measurement of the tenure of Malcolm Rogers at the MFA.

Elsewhere, the big front doors let a burst of winter sunlight up the great main staircase of the MFA, shining up toward John Singer Sargent's murals on the ceiling above. The sunlight is followed through the doors by a school group, come to the MFA on a field trip as the semester winds down before the Christmas holidays. At the foot of the great front staircase, Rogers himself measures his tenure in the sunlight streaming in.

"I wanted this to be the welcoming place," Rogers says, pointing up the staircase. "I wanted the stairs to lead to something wonderful.

"A cultural organization can win new audiences. There's a limit - we cannot change American society, but we have to be socially ambitious. What we know about people who don't visit museums is that they're exactly like the people who do visit museums, only they don't, because they don't feel there's a welcome for them there."

"This [renovation] is a huge opportunity," he says. "The museum looks like a palace building. One of the reasons why our new building is going to be transparent is so that people can see people walking around in there, and they won't feel like I feel in New York, standing outside some fancy boutique and thinking, `Will they think I'm not a serious customer if I go in there? Am I wearing the right shoes?'"

When art and commerce speak to each other, it seems, someone always has to translate. You can hear them talking now, in the clamor of the children up the marble stairs.

"Open the front doors," commerce says, "and you never know who might come in."

"My dear young man," art begins, but whatever comes next is drowned out by the clattering footsteps, and no- body hears it at all.