ABSTRACT
Curators for years have vigorously debated whether open storage helps to ‘demystify’ museums or merely confuses visitors with its huge number of objects placed seemingly at random. The new open-storage facility at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art features what has been described variously as ‘a straightforward compromise’ to the storage problem facing most art museums and ‘the ultimate closet’. The Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art, which opened in December 1988, is 16,000 square feet of open storage devoted to approximately 10,000 works of art. But it is more than merely open storage; it is the locus for the American art curators’ cataloguing projects; the site of a computerized public access system; and the information centre of the Metropolitan’s American Wing, providing facts on every work of art curated by this section of the museum.
