Michael Gross: Where Is The Love?

By Ron Hogan on May 21, 2009 8:02 AM

Longtime GalleyCat readers may recall that every now and then we’d check in with Michael Gross and his unauthorized history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogues’ Gallery; in a roundabout way, we even helped resolve Gross’s problems lining up suitable cover art. Well, now the book is out, and the New York media’s line on it is—well, so far it’s pretty much people wondering why the New York media don’t have much of a line, even a hostile one, on it yet.

Earlier this week, Jesse Kornbluth ran an article on HeadButler.com openly speculating that New York’s sociocultural elite had circled the wagons against Gross, citing Annette de la Renta‘s threatened lawsuit over alleged factual inaccuracies in the book before concluding, “A rich woman has used a two-ton gorilla to threaten a writer, and, for whatever reason, silence has descended.” Now the New York Observer is dipping its toe in the conspiracy theory waters, after a (more objective) fashion: While noting that Rogues Gallery has gotten “lots of dirty looks but little buzz,” Reid Pillifant lets Gross be the one who actually asks what the heck’s going on while saying things like “I know that people like that throw their weight around” while putting forward “the idea that there was someone out there who wanted to squish my book like a bug.”

So is Michael Gross really the victim of a media elite freeze-out, or is there an alternative explanation? One could conceivably argue that this is what happens when print media’s book coverage dies on the vine, although that hypothesis is undermined by the fact that New York’s daily newspapers haven’t cut their coverage as extensively as other papers have—but even then, book review editors have the unenviable task of trying to fit ten pounds of culture into a five-pound sack, week in week out. (If the New York Sun was still in business, and running its excellent review section, might that paper have given Rogues’ Gallery space by now? Maybe, maybe not.) We don’t know which answer is the right answer, of course, although we do know which one is more entertaining to contemplate—although we suppose if you’re Michael Gross, “entertaining” might not be the word you’d choose to define the situation.