字串與表達 – Chunks and Expressions

Exhibition tour: Making the Met by Steve Martin, 2022

The original for 2022/10/21 14:00-16:00 ASRD   by Reed C.

Visitors: College of Social Science, National Chengchi University

NARRATOR:

Good morning to all of you and welcome to visit the exhibition center of NCSIST.

My name is Reed and I’ll be your guide through this section of aerospace and aviation.

——————

“Chunks and expressions” excerpted from Exhibition tour: Making the Met

——————

NARRATOR:

Hello, and welcome to the exhibition “Making the Met.”

I’m Steve Martin and I’ll be your guide on this section.

Today, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world’s most renowned museums collection that span some 5,000 year of world culture, and it welcomes over seven million visitors per year.

This year, we celebrate the museum’s 150^th anniversary.

Here’s Max Hollein:

This has given us an occasion not only to celebrate, but also to reflect on our past. This exhibition offers you a variety of stories, told through outstanding works of art from our collections and through the voices of the people who have made a lasting impact on the

institution.

NARRATOR:

Here’s Andrea Bayer, one of the organizers of the exhibition.

ANDREA BAYER:

In this introductory gallery, we have seven remarkable works of art, all of them inspired by the human figure. Because in this exhibition, we want you to be thinking about people. And we thought that by having these figures in your mind’s eye, you’ll get in the spirit that will bring you into this story.

The exhibition  is organized around a central axis that we refer to as “The Street” moving from one end to the other is a kind of time travel illustrating life around the

Museum from the past 150 years.

NARRATOR:

From the very beginning, the Met aimed to collect works of art across media and from every part of the globe. The objects in this gallery all were acquired during the museum’s founding decades.

NARRATOR:

In 1870, Luigi Palma di Cesnola – the man who would become the Metropolitan Museum’s first director- was eating breakfast in Cyprus.

The diggers he’d hired had made a thrilling discovery: this ancient stone head.

LUIGI PALMA DI CESNOLA (ACTOR):

“… as its massive stony features were revealed to me by the fitful gleams of the lights, there arose a vision of a people whose master-hands had ages age withered and fallen into dust.”

NARRATOR:

That’s the sound of this Sang-Gauk, or Burmese harp.

ANDREA BAYER:

It’s one of over 3,600 musical instruments cataloged by the Museum’s first woman curator, Frances Morris, who also oversaw our extensive collection of textiles.

FRANCES MORRIS (ACTOR):

“I have spared no efforts in developing the collections placed in my care, and have endeavored in every way to carry forward the desired educational policy of the Museum.”

ANDREA BAYER:

Hoping to fulfill its mission as an educational institution, the Museum created study rooms accessible to all. They still exist today.

NARRATOR:

Each of the exceptional works of art in this gallery made its way to the museum because of the ambitions of individual collectors.

This case contains extraordinary objects of many types and many of them came to the Met by way of one man- the legendary banker J. Pierpont Morgan. His wife Frances once chided:

FRANCES MORGAN (ACTOR):

“Pierpont will buy anything, from a pyramid to a tooth of Mary Magdalene.”

NATTATOR:

Morgan was the most powerful financier of the Gilded Age, a period when a handful of men controlled the vast majority of American wealth. As one trusteed put it, they eventually helped place the Met at “the forefront of the world’s treasure houses, with the Louvre and Madrid.”

ANDREA BAYER:

Hatshepsut was one of the most famous female pharaohs. Her co-ruler and successor, Thutmose III, intentionally destroyed all of her likenesses in an attempt to erase her legacy. The fact that this statue sits here today is a testament to the perseverance and collaboration of art historians and conservators around the world.

Historically, The Met participated in excavations with local governments through the Middle East, keeping a share of the finds. But today, The Met no longer acquires objects through active excavation.

In the early twentieth century, The Met made a commitment to collecting American paintings.

NARRATOR”

This remarkable Mexican basin was used for washing altar linens. In 1911, the collector Emily de Forest offered it to the museum writing:

EMILY DE FOREST (ACTOR):

“It seems to me to form a part of a collection representing the arts of Mexico which I hope will at some time be represented in the Museums, as an American Museum.”

NARRATOR:

Today, however, the American Wing strives to bring together art from the multiplicity of cultures that make up the Americas.

ANDREA BAYER:

The  Met has a complicated history with the modern movements of its time. It took H. O. and Louisine Havemeyer’s extraordinary bequest in 1929 to bring Degas and the Impressionists fully into the Museum.

NARRATOR:

In turn-of-the-century New York, many museumgoers would have been shocked by a sprawling, realistic nude like this one. But not Louisine Havemeyer. She was a trailblazing collector, and she’s largely responsible for the museum’s inoredible collection of 19^th-century French art.

In 1898, she lobbied her husband Harry to purchase this painting by Gustave Courbeet.

5:34/11:40

LOUISINE HAVEMEYEY (ACTOR)”

Many of you know, four years ago, …

We’re halfway through this project now.

Arranged these picture in ways that I think will astonish you

Because of the…

It’s an occasion to reacquaint yourself with the collection and simply enjoy the Metropolitan Museum’s offerings.