Met Curator Andrew Bolton, Quiet Defender Of Fashion As Art

NEW YORK (AP) — The opening seconds of the trailer for "The First Monday in May," the new documentary about the dizzyingly star-studded Met Gala, show pop star Rihanna tossing her fashionable head in slo-mo as the red-carpet cameras click furiously. Suitably, she sports a glistening tiara. [...] suddenly we're looking at a boyish, bespectacled man far from the limelight, far from Rihanna and Bieber and Beyonce, walking through the dimmed galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Through the Looking Glass, and the gala that accompanied it — an annual evening for the Met's Costume Institute that has become, under the relentless nurturing of Vogue's Anna Wintour, a huge fundraiser (as in $12.5 million in one night) and one of the top celebrity gatherings in the world. [...] he acknowledges it's a tough balance — not just at the Met Gala, where the celebrities shine so brightly, but also in the fashion world itself, where celebrities play a key role in promoting designers. [...] Bolton, who last September became the chief curator at the Costume Institute, thinks fashion's getting a raw deal from some who resist seeing it as art. In the film, he's seen clashing — ideologically, that is — with other Met curators who are afraid his exhibition will overwhelm the traditional Asian art shown in some of the same galleries. At a meeting, she demands that the museum's Temple of Dendur be closed to the public on the Sunday before the gala so Rihanna can rehearse; people will just have to come back another time, she says. [...] watch her reject the proposed decor of the new Vogue offices, declaring that the place looks like a "secondhand vintage store" and that a video display in a reception area "is making me violently ill."