An Attempt at a Mission Statement

por·tal: /ˈpôrdl/ noun

noun: portal; plural noun: portals

1. 1. a doorway, gate, or other entrance, especially a large and imposing one.

Go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and ask any of the red-tied employees how many rooms there are inside The Museum, and you’ll get a colorful array of answers.

400. 500. 600.

I dunno. Way too many if you ask me.

Are you counting the basements?

What consititutes a room?

Who are you?

Count them yourself, how the fuck should I know.

All satisfactory answers, for sure. But what if you want a more precise answer?

I’ve been visiting the Met almost as long as I’ve lived in New York, just shy of nine years. In that time, it’s gone from an intimidating monolith in an unfriendly neighborhood to a bewildering, mercurial friend in a still-unfriendly neighborhood. The Museum is always changing, never the same. You fall in love with a room, or a painting, or an object one day in the summer. A few months later in the depths of winter, you’re called to go see it again, only to find that it’s been shifted into storage, leant to another museum, or moved to a distant gallery and the good-natured, long-suffering guard on duty has no idea where it could possibly have ended up. Room themes change, whole wings close for renovation, the place itself seems to shift beneath your feet. The emotionally sensitive among us cannot, therefore, afford to fall in love with individual objects except in the most extraordinary cases. The operative assumption of this project is that Every Last Room at a painstakingly curated institution like The Met offers something to be admired on any day you go, no matter what hangs on the walls or sits in the display cases that particular day.

The deeply personal (read as: don’t tell me I’m wrong) reason for this assumption is something like the heart of this project, and it goes a little something like this: Museums like the Met are not primarily to be experienced as displays of art, but as PORTALS into distant dimensions. Therefore, the central claim of this project is that this is an underrated reason to visit museums. By bringing you into these portals and providing a guide to the relative quality of the ones that exist inside The Met, I hope to convince you