Record donation to New York Metropolitan Museum – Culture

Donations of millions from the super-rich are not uncommon for the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. They cover a large part of the costs for operations, exhibitions and new purchases. But the $ 125 million that Oscar Tang and Agnes Hsu-Tang are now donating to the museum is a record. “This country was good to me, good to both of us”, quoted the New York Times Tang. “We want to help shape it.” Tang, 83, was born in Shanghai and came to the United States at the age of 11. His parents fled to Hong Kong before the Cultural Revolution. In 1970 he founded an investment firm in New York. His wife is an art historian and advised Unesco and Barack Obama on art issues.

The museum wants to use the money to rebuild its exhibition rooms for modern and contemporary art, with which the curators have long been unhappy. In addition, they are to be supplemented by a new wing, which has been discussed for years, which will bear the name of the Tangs. The donation should also help Tang to expand the modern and contemporary department beyond the western canon. Like many other museums, especially in the United States, the Metropolitan seeks to overcome the dominance of Western, white, and male art narrative.

The Metropolitan is best known for its holdings from antiquity and from Medieval and Renaissance Europe. It is not without controversy that it also collects and shows works from the 20th and 21st centuries. After all, New York has three of the world’s most important museums specializing in this era with the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim, but above all with the Museum of Modern Art. But for Agnes Hsu-Tang it is precisely the proximity to other eras that makes the Met interesting for modern times: “It is the only museum that can tell the entire history of mankind beyond these borders.”

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