Met

Wednesday

Mary Wakefield

How can we de-programme the police?

From our UK edition

I’m not sure why I started following the photographer Alastair Hilton on X. He’s right-ish politically, so perhaps the algorithm just blew him my way. But through the rising tide of online bilge, I still seek out and enjoy Hilton’s posts, mostly because he talks about pubs and posts pictures of cold pints on hot days. Hilton has a narrowboat on the Thames in Chiswick and seems to half live in the bars along the river, so he was extremely cross about a recent proposal to remove the tables and chairs from the riverside, especially from his local pub, the Bell and Crown.

Tuesday

Don Baton

How to fix the Met

The Metropolitan Opera has been in the hole for years and for most of that time company leadership has pleaded ignorance as to why. Just this February, general director Peter Gelb lamented audiences’ lack of interest in the Met’s slate of contemporary operas. “It’s impossible to predict hits,” said the man paid $1.4 million a year to, well, predict hits. In its 2025-26 season slate, the Met finally seems to be wising up – but it faces an uphill climb. For the better part of a decade, the company has been financially unprofitable, artistically boring and actively hostile to its audience. ‘It’s impossible to predict hits,’said the man paid $1.

Met
Wilson
Paul Devlin

Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson is a must-see show

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson is a must-see show. Originating as an exhibition at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Met’s show is certainly the museum’s largest solo exhibition of an African-American artist’s work in recent memory, perhaps ever. It’s definitely the biggest-ever showing of Wilson’s work, but the Met is not patting itself on the back on these points. The show is a tribute to a fine artist of boundless talent, a painter of deeply felt and expertly rendered works, even if it will not rewrite any narratives of art history. Wilson (1922-2015) was an African-American artist of Guyanese descent who had a long and many-chaptered career.

Saturday

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

The Met’s ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’ is equally horrifying and inspiring

One of the first pieces exhibited in Superfine: Tailoring Black Style – The Met’s annual spring Costume Institute exhibition – is a small and faded tan wool livery coat, most likely created by Brooks Brothers, the oldest apparel brand in continuous operation in the States. On its website the New York-based Brooks Brothers proudly claims that since it was founded in 1818 it has dressed no less than “39 presidents, along with industry leaders and cultural innovators.” What it doesn’t say it that it also dressed southern slaves. The mid-19th century tan coat was worn by a black enslaved child, just before the Civil War, at a time when household servants reflected their owner’s status.

Tuesday

Calla Di Pietro

A cultural summer in the city

New York is gilded in beguiling art. It has an excess of riches and though summer is one of the best times to visit, quenching your cultural thirst can be difficult, as the arts patrons decamp to the Hamptons and watering holes ending in -an. From museums to galleries to street art at subway stations or parks, each borough is a canvas, so much so that it is often an afterthought against a landscape of pavement and honking cars. Will you be uptown for the first Monday in May? While the performances on the Met Gala’s red carpet are an art form in themselves, the exhibit the gala underwrites offers plenty to check out uptown as the tulips bloom on Park Avenue.

New York

Monday

Robert Peston

What’s going on with the Met and partygate?

From our UK edition

I don't understand the logic behind how the Met Police is conducting its probe into unlawful parties at Downing Street and the Cabinet Office. My confusion reached brain-aching proportions after my ITV colleague Anushka Asthana disclosed on Friday that officials had received fixed penalty notices – fines – for attending perhaps the most famous of all the Downing Street events, the Bring Your Own Booze garden party on 20 May 2020, revealed by an email leaked to ITV News. The point is that I know of at least two relatively junior officials who have been informed by the police that they've been fined. So there is no longer any doubt this was a law-breaking party.

Tuesday

Gilbert T. Sewall

Afrofuturism and the decline of our art museums

In the spirit of the times, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is now unveiling an “Afrofuturist period room” that “transforms a 19th-century interior into a speculative future home” of historically oppressed blacks. It’s quite a departure in museology. Entitled “Before Yesterday We Could Fly,” the gallery is expected to have long wait lines. The Bulletin, the Met’s highly regarded quarterly publication, will devote its February 2022 issue to the project and include a “graphic novella” that “animates the objects on display.” A co-ordinate Afrofuturist festival at Carnegie Hall promises that “epiphanies will abound in this experiential saga through the realm of Astro-Blackness.

Friday

Sam Ashworth-Hayes

The problem with the Met’s morality policing

From our UK edition

Ah, the last days of summer. Long evenings, sunny weekends, and crusty Extinction Rebellion hippies blocking arterial traffic lanes to the audible grinding of teeth from the police officers tasked with standing by and politely watching their sub-art-school amdram productions, rather than getting on with the business of giving them a much-needed hosing down with Boris’s water cannons. As Charlie Peters has pointed out for the Mail, the impression of police impotence has nothing to do with the willingness of the bobby on the beat to break out a truncheon and apply it liberally to the thorax of middle-class graduates enjoying their day off by making everyone else late for work.

Monday

Nick Tyrone

Priti Patel’s cowardly response to the Clapham Common debacle

From our UK edition

Priti Patel's reaction to the ugly scenes on Clapham Common on Saturday has been to point the finger. ‘Some of the footage circulating online from the vigil in Clapham is upsetting. I have asked the Metropolitan Police for a full report on what happened', she has said. But do we really need to wait for a report to work out what has happened?  Perhaps, instead, the truth is rather simpler: the police were enforcing laws put into places by Priti Patel's own government. Of course, there is some debate as to whether officers should have exercised more judgement in the applications of these laws. On this point, though, Patel has been clear: there should be no ifs or buts in the way officers enforce lockdown rules.