So this change of locale brought me to a particularly odd nodal point in one Thomas Hoving. Thomas Hoving was the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art affectionately known as the Met by more cultured personages than myself. Hoving isn’t someone I’d particularly search out as a fascinating topic of discussion. Hoving isn’t a dragon or a fucking unicorn. Hoving didn’t openly use psychedelic drugs. Hoving doesn’t wax poetic about whiskey or craft beer. Hoving doesn’t make loud, abrasive music. Hoving certainly doesn’t hold a spray can effectively, at least not within my current level of familiarity with the man and his legacy.

But Thomas Hoving apparently did a whole slew of things within his lifetime that the arts community respected enough to write a particularly engaging article in Art Forum. And seeing as how I was a captive audience nursing two types of head wounds (a punch to the jaw from an errant mosher and a blow to the liver) I was all eyes. And so I cupped my head in my hands and began reading the story of Hoving, who at exactly my age of thirty six had become the director of the Met bringing a sense of showmanship that would be both ridiculed and respected by New York and beyond.

I imagine Hoving as being some sort of Indiana Jones of the art world though thats probably the most gutteral way to refer to him. The man was obsessed with finding art attested by his mantra “When I see something I want, I do everything I can to get it.” Clearly, this is a man that does not fuck around; the gears grinding behind the sinuses operating with otaku-like fervor. Its that instinct that you come to respect over the course of the ten or so odd minutes it takes for me to ingest and reflect. Here is a guy that sees an object come into being and immediately recognizes its autonomy and metaphysical sentience, right?

Which leads Hoving to the rather dicey matter of the Bury Saint Edmund’s Cross also knows as the Cloisters Cross. In Hoving’s 1981 tell all some twenty years after being aquired with Hoving’s aid for the Met he describes it as follows:

“The inscriptions on it are so hate filled and yet its such a masterwork. Its as if Hitler and Michaelangelo collaborated to make a masterpiece.”

Its about here where either the caffeine is starting to settle in or Art Forum just turned into the printed media I should have stolen from my ex before vacating our mutual agreement of cohabitation. Because clearly, this Hoving character is someone that should’ve been physically on my radar. Its not that I idolize the above statement. I’m clearly the most apologetic white male I know. But it blows the mind that this man facilitated the purchase of an object based on artisan merit alone. And then hid the rather sickening nature of its true meaning lost upon those not hip to the lingo of the 12th century monastics, which have the museum and art community backpedalling to this day.

In true Guattarian form, the object and the artist were at a standoff between master and servant. Here was a piece of craft that was given the chance to be respected on its own autonomy, free of the ideology and hate inscribed by the creator and their Creator who art in Heaven. Hallowed be thine name. Therein lies the maverick nature of Hoving which admittedly could have been construed as a tad bit reckless and nieve. An article of transgression far more radioactive than Serrano’s Piss Christ, the Cloisters Cross goes beyond questioning the desperate idiocy of religion. And the curator makes this statement by standing behind it and selecting it and willing into being the funds and stage to make it possible.

Its there where you wonder why the fuck it took you this long to come across this guy who began to subvert and revolutionize an institution at an age where you piss away your PBR night by night in dirty loft bathrooms. Why hasn’t this guy popped up on the facebook feed of your four hundred and forty three friend collection (surely four hundred and fifty by now?) Why wasn’t a scandal of this magnitude lodged deep in your consciousness as much as Serrano’s aforementioned work that motivated Jesse Helms and crew? Could it be a testament to the genius of Hoving, the once proclaimed PT Barnum of New York Art? That Hoving knew what real art was and did his best to represent it in its true light.

Those musings are left to more informed journalists of highly lauded arts magazines and not to street level hip hop emcees who find it painfully hipsterish to be reading a token copy of said magazine in public. If there is any message within the story of Bury Saint Edmunds for myself, its not for me to ramble on about any more than I have already. I am already at risk for sounded far too smart and informed for my own good on the internet. I’m sure the next time I’m sitting at the bar this meditation will come in handy wafting off the whiskey vampires and waves of herpes perched on my peripherary.

And to think, I’m only on page forty six.

Thomas Hoving’s book “King of the Confessors” is available on Amazon.

You can subscribe to art forum at a special discounted rate of 46$ for a year subscription online here.