Sept. 10 (Bloomberg) -- When the mighty Metropolitan Museum of Art yesterday named a little-known tapestry specialist as successor to longtime director Philippe de Montebello, it sent a message to the international art world: Money isn't everything.

As beholden to the bottom line as any cultural institution today, the Met still bends to the altar of connoisseurship.

Thomas P. Campbell, the museum's 46-year-old choice for the director's chair, is a British-born, Oxford-educated art historian who has never run an institution. He doesn't even head up his own department at the Met, European sculpture and decorative arts. Yet he beat out Ian Wardropper, his 57-year-old superior, for the museum's top job.

Many in the art world would like to have been a fly on the wall when its best-kept secret ever was sealed.

News of Campbell's appointment was so stunning, even to staff within the museum, that the CIA might do well to start recruiting in the Met boardroom.

The decision has done nothing to quiet speculation about the succession that began even before the 72-year-old de Montebello announced his retirement nine months ago.

Now everyone wants to know how someone working in a minor discipline with no executive experience got what is arguably the biggest job in the museum world today.

Dark Horse

Frankly, it seems fitting that a dark horse like the youthful Campbell should take the reins. In this U.S. presidential election year, inexperience seems anything but an obstacle to success. It might even be an asset, especially when the candidate comes with ideals, refined speech and a winning personality.

Still, Campbell received his doctorate from London's distinguished Courtauld Institute. He didn't even try business school. If he has proved adept at persuading other institutions to loan important works to his two big exhibitions of European tapestries (in 2002 and 2007), he has never had to find underwriters, raise money for a capital campaign, or field questions from the status-conscious fashion press, which gathers each spring for the Met's annual Costume Institute Gala, its biggest fundraising event of the year.

I would guess that Campbell has never had to pack for a yacht or step aboard a Gulfsteam jet plane to vacation with the families of potential patrons, pondering whether to enlist a wife and two children.

He's a scholar, not a showboater.

He has his work cut out for him.

Neil Macgregor

When the search for a new director began, many in the art world expected the Met to hire a seasoned professional like Neil Macgregor, director of the British Museum.

Because the Met likes to hire from within -- de Montebello had assisted former director Thomas Hoving before taking the job - - attention focused intensely on Gary Tinterow, the well-tailored senior curator of 19th, 20th Century and Modern Art, and a de Montebello protege.

In the last month, however, the name of a total outsider, Max Hollein, director of the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, rose to the top of the list.

Then, yesterday afternoon, came the bombshell announcement of Campbell, who will be only the ninth director in the Met's 138 years.

Quiet experience got Campbell his job, though he is lucky that this museum prizes a depth of knowledge in art and talent for organizing large-scale exhibitions -- its meat-and-potatoes -- over management skills. (For that, it has Emily K. Rafferty, the Met's very capable, popular president.)

Textile Archive

Campbell does oversee the museum's extensive textile archive, and he played an integral role in developing its online database.

And his sweeping surveys of tapestries did more than distract a public with an appetite for Leonardo and Van Gogh. Visually splendid and well researched, they actually excited interest in a discipline most people barely knew existed, or had any idea it was remotely interesting.

Still. As chief, Campbell undoubtedly will be called on to put out fires among the staff and, in this increasingly fractious world, between nations obsessively claiming pieces of the Met's collections for their own patrimony.

As the face of the Met, he will have to attract big money and make acquisitions large and small, and not just of the art- historical kind. Campbell will have to conduct a few talent searches of his own as other senior staff members head to retirement.

Most of all he will have to let the Met be the Met. Making radical changes to its presentations won't make its collections seem any more important. But Campbell could make better sense of them.

Refined Level

He would be wise to turn his sights within, rebuilding and rearranging the Met's vast holdings and bringing each department up to the refined level of its recently refurbished Greek and Roman pavilion.

He might even look for better real estate to house that uppity Costume Institute, which has been relegated since its founding to a claustrophobic section of the basement under the mummies.

From what this museum has shown us so far, there's no reason not to trust it to take a thread from one of Campbell's magnificent tapestries -- and only get more splendid with wear.

(Linda Yablonsky is an art critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this review: Linda Yablonsky in New York at fabyab@earthlink.net.

Last Updated: September 10, 2008 08:36 EDT