If you’ve been reading GalleyCat for a while, you may be familiar with the ongoing saga of Rogues’ Gallery, Michael Gross‘s unauthorized history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and how, after an initial misunderstanding, this blog helped establish detente with regard to the book’s cover art, which was finalized last summer.
Now, on the eve of the book’s publication, New York reports that the Met’s board of trustees is worked up, and claims to have gotten its hands on notes from a recent meeting where “senior vice-president for external affairs Harold Holzer was forced to explain how the book… came together.” Holzer comes off well in the secondhand story—we certainly don’t envy him having to deal with all the hoopla surrounding Rogues’ Gallery, or the hoopla it’s going to inspire—but we’re still on the brink of a major case of the giggles, as we can’t help but think of indignant trustees harumphing around a conference table, and rattling teacups with the pounding of their fists.
(We freely admit to an overactive imagination, one which sets our minds to a mildly skeptical ponderance: With New York’s gossip depositories tracking every step of Gross’s project from proposal to publication, who on that board could be so far out of the loop to only now be asking about it?)