New York Times art critic Holland Cotter totally hearts the new Art of the Americas Wing at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.
BOSTON — Five years after breaking ground, the new Art of the Americas Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts here is opening on Saturday, and it’s a wow. Almost double-wow. Really good.
I’m not talking about the outside — your basic blank glass box — designed by the British architects Norman Foster & Partners, but the inside: 53 well-proportioned galleries, large and small, holding some 5,000 objects, more than twice the amount of Americas material previously on display. And given that this museum’s American colonial collection is the world’s best, more is definitely more.
Not surprisingly, the MFA has been partying like it’s 1776 all week. The Missus and I had the bad luck to stop by for Young & Pretentious night on Friday, despite being demonstrably not young and congenitally unpretentious.
Regardless, several pages after Cotter’s NYT rave, there appeared – coincidentally or not – an MFA ad offering free admission on November 20.
Which is today.
Which you should take advantage of.
Campaign Outsider 
Since you’re a Boston analyst of the media, working at Boston University, shouldn’t you first reference the Boston Globe’s over-the-top coverage of the opening of the new Art of the America’s wing at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts? They had a whole section in last Sunday’s paper, photos galore online, a mini-scandal with temporary censorship of a critical cartoon… yet you go with the NY paper? Why NY Times all-the-time?
I’m just sayin’, is all…
Absolutely fabulous new wing. At times, jaw-dropping. Took the little girl who went gaga for Walls O’ Washington, Wall O’ Niagara Falls, Staccato, and so on.
Fair question, Michael. Here’s the thing: When the Boston Globe puts on the pom-poms for the MFA, that’s business as usual. But when the New York Times does the same, that’s news.