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THE RECENTLY ANNOUNCED $10-million gift from Henry Kravis to the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the sort of gesture that causes devotees of that other metropolitan art monolith - you've heard of it, it's called the Brooklyn Museum - to weep and cheer at the same time.
Jealous tears are understandable. When's the last time a merchant banker dropped that kind of bundle on Brooklyn?
But cheers? "Isn't it nice," says Brooklyn Museum director Bob Buck, with a fleeting, canary-eating smile, "that the Met is almost done?"
"Now it's our turn," declares the museum's vice director for planning, Joan Darragh.
The Kravis gift completes the Met's master plan for expansion. And just in time, too, as far as Robert Treat Buck and the Brooklyn art mafia are concerned. For the overstuffed and underappreciated 92year-old Brooklyn Museum is itself embarking on a master plan for expansion.
And the key to its success is Bob Buck. A mercurial but also driven museum maestro, he likes to mount what he calls "daring" shows, such as the recent exhibit of works by the sculptor Beverly Pepper, which drew both passionately ecstatic and derisive reviews. Buck is well known in the microcircles of museum people for a flashing temper, a smooth charm and a devotion to contemporary art. Nevertheless, considering the astonishing scope of the project he has undertaken and its importance as a Brooklyn civic symbol, he is surprisingly anonymous in New York.
Trustees have long hoped the museum could du- plicate the achievement of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which exploited its geographical and psychological distance from Manhattan to establish itself as an artistic outlaw, as the hot new place for avantgarde performers and audiences.
With that mission in mind, Bob Buck - with his daring contemporary-art credentials - was a perfect match for the museum directorship. He believes that new art will draw new patrons, young collectors who have seedling fortunes but lack the clout to be crucial players at the Met or the Museum of Modern Art. He has tried to persuade them that their energies could transform the Brooklyn.
Already he's had some success. He's formed the museum's first council of advisers on contemporary art, people who by their association with the museum have...