随便哪一天，从大都会艺术博物馆（Metropolitan Museum of Art）展出的数十万件展品中仅仅挑一件，仔细琢磨透，恐怕都能助你取得博士学位。

    但是，如果连游客都需要拥有艺术史学位才能在馆内玩得尽兴的话，情况就不妙了。没有人比托马斯•坎贝尔更了解这一点。2008年9月，他由纺织品展馆的馆长晋升为大都会艺术博物馆的总掌门。然而，就在他履新大约一周后，美国经济陷入了一场严重的衰退之中。

    他刚一上任，就立即冻结了博物馆的招聘工作，还裁掉了大约15%的员工，而此时，博物馆的全部捐赠基金价值下降了约四分之一。为了保持大都会艺术博物馆在文化界的地位，坎贝尔认为必须扩大博物馆吸引力。

    幸运的是，坎贝尔拥有不少非常有吸引力的展品。他说：“我认为伟大的艺术品、甚至一些看起来极其朴素的展品，也会让人们穿越时空，与其他时代的人们联系起来。他们生活的时代或许迥然不同，但却往往怀着非常相似的希望和梦想。”坎贝尔的计划是，帮助我们每一个人找到这种联系，把它连接到此时此地。大都会艺术博物馆的某些数据正在上扬。去年，该博物馆的入馆人数超过了560万人次，创下了历史新高。

    坎贝尔在接受《财富》杂志（Fortune）采访时谈到了织锦世界最初如何让他惊叹万分；满足馆长的需要与放养一群猫有何相似之处；这家伟大的博物馆的某些部分为什么有点像通天塔（Tower of Babel）。下文是经过编辑的采访实录。

    《财富》：最初是什么吸引你到大都会艺术博物馆工作的？

    托马斯•坎贝尔：从广义上讲，是哲学上的原因。我曾经是一位研究织锦的学者，来大都会艺术博物馆的原因是，我认为在这个地方，我可以组织真正具备学术影响力的大型展览，但与此同时，我还可以吸引到大量的普通观众。

    我真的认为，大都会艺术博物馆是作为一家教育机构建立起来的。它不仅仅是一家美国博物馆，还是一所涵盖了所有文化的博物馆。在当今世界，这种理念依然具有重大的现实意义。无论是开罗还是埃及发生的动荡，它们都可以追溯到几个世纪之前的问题，是它们在当下的体现。知道吗？穿行在我们的美术馆，或许可以找到其中一些问题的答案，从而以更宽广的视野理解当下、过去过去与未来之间其联系的复杂性。

    You could probably earn a Ph.D. working with just one piece out of the hundreds of thousands on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art any given day.

    But it's bad business if visitors need an art history degree to have a good time at the museum. No one knows this better than Thomas Campbell, who moved up from his position as a textile curator to direct the museum in September 2008, about a week before the economy took a plunge.

    Right after he took the job, the Met froze hiring, laid off roughly 15% of its staff, and its total endowment funds dropped by about a quarter of its value. To maintain the Met's cultural relevance, Campbell believes he's going to have to broaden its appeal.

    Luckily, he says, he's got some very appealing material to work with. "I think great works of art, or even very just very humble objects, connect you through time and space with people who might have been living in very different times but often with very similar hopes and dreams." The plan is to help people, anyone really, draw those connections to the here and now. Some of the Met's numbers are looking up. Last year, it pulled a record attendance of over 5.6 million people.

    Campbell talks to Fortune about how he was first wowed by the world of tapestries, how catering to curators can be like herding cats, and why parts of the great museum were a bit like the Tower of Babel. An edited transcript is below.

    Fortune: What drew you to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the first place?

    Thomas Campbell: Broadly, philosophically, I was a tapestry scholar, and I came to the Met because I saw it as a place where I could organize big exhibitions that would have real scholarly clout but at the same time where I would have a broad general audience.

    I truly believe that the Met was set up as an educational institution, and not just as an American museum but a museum of all cultures. In the current world, that vision is as relevant as ever. Whether it's trouble in Cairo or in Syria, these are present day manifestations in some cases of issues that go back centuries, and you know, in our galleries you can kind of unpack some of this and get a broader understanding of the complexity of the present and of the past and the way it's all linked.

    《财富》：你如何让现代的观众认识到这些古老艺术品的现实意义？

    托马斯•坎贝尔：我认为我们可以做更多事情。比如，去年10月，我们重新开放了装饰一新的伊斯兰艺术展区。当时距离911事件已经过去了大约10年。我想，在911事件之前，大多数美国人或许对伊斯兰教知之甚少。接着，在那个恐怖的时刻之后，美国人不可避免地以一种非常极端化的视角来感知这一教派。我们重开这些画廊就是为了展现大量伊斯兰艺术品长达14个世纪的演变历史。令我吃惊，但并不觉奇怪的是，自从我们开办这些画廊以来，我们在4个月里迎来了大约37万名参观者，人潮如织，只有最受欢迎的临时展览才能见到这样的场面。

    《财富》：你们如何延续观众的这种热情？

    托马斯•坎贝尔：大都会艺术博物馆面向的是知识渊博的群体，但不能由此认为我们是一个精英机构。我花了很多心思来思考这样一个问题：我们如何能让这家博物馆变得更平易近人一些。

    出于某种原因，大都会艺术博物馆一直有一个传统，它从不做广告。我不太清楚这个传统的起源。我出任馆长之后，首先做的事情之一就是启动了一项名为“我们该见面了”的广告宣传活动（大都会艺术博物馆英文简称Met的另一层含义是“见面”——译注）。其中一条广告是一对夫妇在罗丹的雕塑“亲吻（The Kiss）”前拥吻的场景。

    同样，我们也打算重新设计一下户外的广场。这个广场的许多地方看起来都有点像一所监狱的院子，显得严峻且令人望而生畏。我们想把这里改造成一个非常有吸引力的地方，让人们一到大都会博物馆就产生一种非常美好的感觉。

    我们正在用更有创意的方式来思考第一次来参观的游客有可能产生的感受。令人惊讶的是，我第一次来的时候，画廊甚至从未编号。

    《财富》：让人们认同你对博物馆的愿景是不是一件很困难的事？

    托马斯•坎贝尔：我的任命决定宣布一周后，雷曼兄弟公司（Lehman Brothers）破产了。就在我等着上任的时候，我亲眼目睹了整个股市崩盘那一幕。好的一面（如果这也算的话）在于，如果没有这场危机，我这样一个刚刚上任、年纪又轻的馆长或许得花上相当长的时间才能说服人们认同我的想法。但外部的资金压力迫使博物馆上下所有的人必须认真思索我们的核心事务。因此，我上任没多久就开始实施我的计划了。

    《财富》：你还记得你第一次喜欢上织锦，也就是你的专长领域，是在什么时候？

    托马斯•坎贝尔：作为一位年轻的艺术史学者，我很幸运。我学习艺术那会，艺术涵盖的范围包括绘画，雕塑和建筑，我当时发现过去的主顾们花费巨资购买织锦，因此我就开始在旅途中观摩织锦作品。

   How do you make ancient pieces of art relevant to a modern audience?

    I think we can do more. For example, last October, we reopened the new galleries of our Islamic art department. It's about 10 years after 9/11. I think before 9/11 most Americans probably had relatively little understanding of Islam. And then, in that terrible moment, the perception was inevitably filtered through a very polarized light. What we've done in reopening these galleries is present 14 centuries of the evolution of many Islamic arts. And what's amazing to me, but not surprising, is that since we opened those galleries, we've had 370,000 visitors in four months. The galleries are drawing crowds as if they were one of our most popular temporary exhibitions.

    How do you sustain that kind of interest?

    While we're addressing people who know a huge amount, the Met mustn't be perceived as an elitist intuition. I've put quite a lot of energy into thinking about how we can make it feel more accessible.

    Take advertising: for some reason there had been a tradition that we never showed people with works of art. I'm not quite sure where that came from. One of the first things I did when I became director was start an advertising campaign called "It's time we Met." One ad in the series showed a couple kissing in front of Rodin's sculpture "The Kiss."

    Similarly, we're about to redesign the plaza outside. Most of it looks like a bit like a prison yard, it's austere, it's forbidding. We want to have an attractive place where people feel good about arriving at the Metropolitan.

    We're thinking much more creatively about what it is like to be a first time visitor. Amazingly, when I came, the galleries had never even been numbered.

    Has it been difficult to get people on board with your vision for the museum?

    Well, a week after the announcement of my appointment, Lehman Brothers went down. As I waited in the wings, I saw the whole stock market collapsing. The silver lining, in so far as there was one, is that it might have taken me quite a while as a young new director to get people on board. But the external finances forced all of our staff to think hard about our core priorities, so I could come in and really get my agenda going.

    Do you remember when you first fell in love with tapestries, your area of expertise?

    I was lucky, as a young art historian, I was studying art as it was then defined, which is painting and sculpture and architecture, and I realized the patrons of the past were spending huge amounts of money on tapestries, so I began looking at tapestries while traveling.

    巴黎的卢浮宫（The Louvre）内挂着一套名为《狩猎的马克西米连》（The Hunts of Maximillion）的织锦名作。这些画作令人难以置信地展现出布鲁塞尔在大约16世纪20年代左右的真实景象。那是一个你可以步入的世界，逼真程度犹如一部IMAX电影。我记得我是在大约20年前看到这些画的，当时我就想：“天啊，这幅画如此直接地再现了过去，体现了它所有的复杂性、美感和暴力！”

    织锦由此成为我的挚爱。现在每天都有馆长来我的办公室，他们是一群很有趣的人。其中一些人非常固执，有时候的情形就像放养一群众口难调的猫。但他们每个人都有自己的爱好。我的工作就是维系、支持他们的愿景。

    《财富》：你在博物馆内有没有一个专门用来思考问题的地方？

    托马斯•坎贝尔：我时常乘坐电梯从我的办公室下到大厅正上方的阳台上。我喜欢下到阳台上，观察游客们进入博物馆的场景。有时我只是随意四处走走，东南西北，任由我的双脚带我去馆内的任何地方。知道吗？我已经在这里呆了16年了，这是一个总能发现新鲜事的地方。

    译者：任文科

    There's one great set of tapestries called "The Hunts of Maximillion" at The Louvre in Paris. They showed incredibly realistic scenes in Brussels from around the 1520s. It's a world you could walk into; it has the vividness of an IMAX movie. I remember seeing these probably 20 years ago and just thinking 'My God, this is such a direct representation of the past in all of its complexity and beauty and violence.'

    That was my passion, and now I have curators coming into my office on a daily basis, and they're an interesting cast of characters. Some of them can be quite ornery, sometimes it's a herding cats situation. But they each have their passion. And my job is sustaining and supporting their vision.

    Is there a particular place in the museum where you have time to think?

    The elevator to my office takes me down to the balcony above the great hall. I love just going down to the balcony and watching our visitors coming into the museum. And then sometimes, just at random, walking north, south, east, west, letting my feet take me wherever. I've been here 16 years, you know, this is a place where you always discover something new.