No matter what the poet says, it’s not the proles trying to find the bathroom that make life at the museum miserable. It’s the bros. In my days at the Guggenheim we used to dread being called in to work the parties for the Young Collectors Council. Forget about helping them appreciate the art; since they thought they were rich they thought they were smart; and since they thought they were smart they thought they understood art, and the proof of that was, that they occasionally bought art that the Museum pushed at them—not so smart, actually. So the hard part was leaving them alone to slosh champagne in the general direction of the artwork, meanwhile dodging Tom Krens’ dagger looks, because weren’t we being paid to teach them to appreciate?
Scott Sartiano is such a bro. Sartiano runs something called Zero Bond, a “members- only club.” Does it have disco balls on the ceiling? I don’t know, it does host “celebrities,” like one Kim Kardashian whose name sounds like scratchy wool: “Oh, look, Aunt Edna knitted me a Kardashian for Christmas!”
Sartiano, by all indications, is one of those clueless people who think there’s something called “The Art World” that’s about hanging with celebrities and sloshing your drink on the right painting at the right party. No wonder Eric Adams, the Clueless Mayor himself, appointed Sartiano as his representative to the Board of Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an appointment whose appropriateness is evident from Sartiano’s stealar letter of application:
Truth is, I’ve seen Museum trustees and benefactors as crass as Sartiano, but I’ve never seen any as ill-prepared, or with so little grasp of of what they’re supposed to be doing on a museum board:
“I go to their meetings about once a month… It’s a big group, so they don’t necessarily ask me a lot of questions.”1
Nor, presumably, does Sartiano ask himself. I doubt he’d know what to ask, and isn’t that the point? There are presently five representatives of City Government sitting on the Met’s Board of Trustees: the Mayor, the Speaker of the City Council, the Parks Commissioner, the Cultural Affairs Commissioner, the Comptroller. That’s five down from the preceding year, when each of the City’s seats had a delegate doing the actual attending, thereby dispensing the City of actually doing the work of administering the Museum.
Because, in case you didn’t know: the Metropolitan Museum of Art is not a private corporation, it’s a private-public partnership in which the public partner would have considerable clout if it wasn’t too cowed to use it. What does it tell you when the City Controller’s happy to delegate his powers of oversight to Harold Holzer, that odious bully and frontman for the Met’s admissions policies?
This year, I’m happy to report, the delegate positions have been abolished, meaning, I suppose, the Mayor, the Controller, etc., might have to take responsibility for the decisions made at the Museum. Perhaps this helps explain why the Mayor chose Sartiano: If you can’t have someone do the deciding for you, at least get someone clueless on the Board, so the big boy billionaires can run the place without interference, as they always have.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art: The only place where the decorations stay up all year.
Special shoutout to Christopher Robbins at hellgatenyc.com, who dug out Sartiano’s application letter under a Freedom of Information request, and from whom I’ve borrowed for this article. Long may he rake the muck-a-muck.
WOID XXIII-34
December 24. 2023
Annie Armstrong, Zero Bond Has Become the New York Art World’s Favorite Private Club. That Doesn’t Make It Cool. Art. Artnet, July 21, 2022