On a bright, breezy Saturday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its redesigned and reconceived Michael C. Rockefeller wing with holdings from Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. At one time or another, I had breezed past the wing’s 1,726 objects before the 2021 renovation began. When friends wanted to check out the architectural bling related to the Oceania rooms—specifically, a reconstructed Ceremonial House Ceiling by Kwoma artists of Papua New Guinea—I went along.

In 1982, the Met had acquired pre-Columbian and African art and artifacts collected by Nelson A. Rockefeller, the politician and oil dynasty scion. Nelson’s son Michael, a young ethnologist, had purchased various artwork from the Pacific islands and Australia before dying in a boat accident in New Guinea in 1961. With the Rockefeller acquisition, the Met built a 40,000-square-foot addition to house it. This renovation changes the floor plan to better integrate the wing with the larger museum, providing a bridge from Greek and Roman galleries that begins with Africa.

Two things struck me during this visit. First, various communities on the island of New Guinea found gods and protectors (for better or worse) in their ancestors. The stacked faces on totem poles are ready reminders of both benevolence and tyranny, same for the body masks that bear an uncanny resemblance to the artistry of indigenous Americans and the large mangrove carvings that mirror the faces of Easter Island. (You can recognize a primeval esthetic from before the continents spread apart.)

The second thing that struck me was the thought that New York City in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found its gods and protectors (for better or worse) in Gilded Age robber barons. John Davison Rockefeller Jr., Nelson’s father and the only son of son of Standard Oil co-founder John D. Rockefeller, gave more than $537 million to various public causes over his lifetime, more than twice the amount he gave to his own family.

Though we don’t stack renderings of their emotive expressions on poles, John Rockefeller pére et fis, along with Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, and their progeny, are remembered both for unprecedented wealth in the midst widespread poverty and for an unprecedented scale of philanthropy. Income tax—the first stirrings of true democracy in a terribly cruel and unfair era that Donald Trump salivates over—was not enacted in the United States until 1913, so who knows how generous these titans would’ve been if they’d been paying up over their lifetimes.

By the time everything became gilded, New York’s super-rich established a gentleman’s agreement of working hand-in-hand with the city’s corrupt Democratic political machine. Before this odd cosmopolitan/parochial system took hold, there were surprising flashes of civic responsibility and benevolence on the part of the merely rich. In reviewing a book on Frederick Law Olmsted, Andrew Delbanco marveled that the city managed to set aside nearly 800 acres of prime real estate for Central Park: “Once upon a time, New York businessmen, politicians, and the social elite, who regarded the immigrant poor with a combination of alarm and a sense of obligation, forced the withdrawal from the real estate market of a huge piece of incalculably valuable land, and preserved it for public purposes.”

But after the Civil War there was no team-playing on behalf of the public. Even through the New Deal years, the LaGuardia and Robert Moses years, and the financial decline of the 1970s, City Hall corruption managed to hold its own alongside millionaires and billionaires putting their names on parts of museums, universities, and hospitals. Though it pales in comparison to pre-taxable robber baron largesse, the contemporary philanthropy of Stephen Schwarzman, the Tisch family, Paul Tudor Jones, Barry Diller, David Geffen, David Koch, the Tangs, and of course the philanthropist-turned-mayor Michael Bloomberg has leaned toward safe bets in the arts, higher ed, and hospital research.

As I walked down Madison after the Met, I couldn’t help noticing the forlorn look of the former Whitney Museum, Marcel Breuer’s Brutalist landmark. The 1966 building is about to become a Sotheby’s auction house where the super-rich can buy all the artwork that colleges and universities might have to surrender if Trump removes their tax-exempt status. Just as I was thinking how “Brutalist” would be a great term for our current style of robber baron, I passed on the sidewalk the snowball-headed Bill Ackman yakking on his phone, perhaps professing his undying faith in Trump to the press or maybe even addressing His Holiness Himself.

What unites Ackman with the billionaire generation of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Larry Page, and various Silicon Valley brethren is the desire to buck the philanthropic legacy and hold on to even more unspendable wealth than ever, parting with assets only to sway elections and make the world conform to their wants. They are a strange lot. Zuckerberg’s Jewfro makeover left people scratching their heads. Thiel looks like a white guy who did something notoriously bad in Mississippi in 1961. Ackman looks like an AI image even in person. I think we can agree that the idea of the super-rich being actively engaged in benevolent, non-political philanthropy will die out when Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffet, and MacKenzie Scott do.

Still, New York’s safe, shiny arts projects funded by the Bloomberg generation will continue for a while at least. Go to the galleries of the Met any weekend and you’ll see people from all over the world happy to be in this place, wishing they lived here. It’s no surprise that in May New York was ranked the world’s 17th happiest city, but it’s hard to be optimistic about our city’s future with an authoritarian cult running the country. Trump’s war on illegal immigration is really a war on blue cities. On June 16, a day after the No Kings rallies, he posted on his Truth Social that New York, Los Angeles, Chicago “and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens.”

With the Democratic mayoral primary a day away, our city is locked in another anguishing race, this one between two extremes: Zohran Mamdani, the ultra-progressive with little proven executive leadership experience, and the regressive face of Boss Tweed politics. Why is this happening? The truth about one of the country’s most progressive cities is that so much of it is anachronistic, the very opposite of cutting edge. New York can be the most parochial place in the world, and many who love the city love that part the most.

But did anyone really want the return of the former governor who resigned in the wake of sexual harassment allegations and accusations of misreporting data on COVID nursing home hospitalizations? When I first heard that Andrew Cuomo wanted to be mayor, I pictured the menacing dark shadow of either a flying dragon or an alien starship. Now, with him leading in the polls in this fiftieth anniversary summer of Jaws, I see him as the circling fin in Steven Spielberg’s movie. The great white father of COVID lockdown is now out to bludgeon the box office.

As governor, Cuomo wanted a regime. Helping the people of New York State was down on the list. I worked in Cuomo’s administration like many good Democrats. Why? Because the people in his administration did want to help the people of New York. He knew enough to hire the most capable and committed to public service. His selling point was that he “gets things done,” but he picks the things to get done. In 2017 he wallowed in the spectacle of the Second Avenue subway extension during the MTA’s summer from hell, with consistent massive train delays.

Cuomo doesn’t grasp what progress is; he only understands gestures and images, and in that regard he is much like Trump. Cuomo displays the same brazen arrogance when he thinks himself more qualified to judge antisemitism than Brad Lander or Scott Stringer, both of whom are Jewish. Like Trump, Cuomo cannot see the world beyond the 1970s. When Mario Cuomo ran for mayor against Ed Koch in 1977, his campaign manager son was credited with the slogan “Vote for Cuomo, not the Homo.” During COVID, he was fond of the phrase “don’t get cocky.” Who says things like that today?

Cuomo never tires to appeal to the current Democratic vibe; like Trump, he strongarms Democrats to shove his anachronistic views down their throats. Authoritarians are as good at demonizing those whom they betray as they are at making people nostalgic for bad times. Politico reported that Cuomo raised nearly $400,000 from donors registered with the Republican Party, and this doesn’t include the massive funding from big business, real estate, construction, and gig economy exploiters like DoorDash through his super PAC. Another donor to his super PAC? Bill Ackman himself.

The sight of Cuomo—this man who wanted to be President—slugging in all directions in the mayoral race reminds me of Wooderson, the Matthew McConaughey character in Dazed and Confused who hangs out at high school keggers to hit on girls. It was Andrew Cuomo’s time to move on four years ago—perhaps, as the NYT Pitchbot would have it, to join Harvard’s Institute of Politics. But Cuomo won’t move on because he can stoke fear with the misconception that only a bully can fight a bully. That’s actually the opposite of what we’re seeing: it’s the team players (like the courts and individual law firms) who’ve been defending us from tyranny. We’ve seen what Trump’s Revenge Tour looks like; do we really want the Cuomo version?

He’s got the union vote, he was endorsed by Bloomberg and now Bill Clinton. How strange that one of the country’s most progressive cities is reverting back to the old that was never great, just like the MAGA cultists. The odd recent endorsement from State Senator Jessica Ramos echoing the odd 2018 endorsement from Letitia James (now Attorney General and one of Cuomo’s arch nemeses) shows that the city’s steampunk machinery from 150 years ago is working just fine.

Andrew Cuomo may have renamed the Tappan Zee Bridge for his father, but it’s his own face that’s already part of New York’s ancestral totem pole—his big mouth open and shouting, Jaws incarnate, for better or worse. §