When I walk into Denny’s office to interview him for this article, I no longer have concerns about tests or papers. As he finishes off his chocolate milk, I pull up a chair, excited to learn where he came from, how he chose Islamic art, and his impressions of working at the Met. Denny grew up in small-town Iowa where he developed interests in physics, math and music. At fifteen, his father got a Fulbright to teach physics at Robert College in Istanbul, where Denny fell in love with architecture, one building in particular: the Mosque of Rustem Pasha. He found it in a French guidebook, given to him by a friend’s mother. “‘It’s very beautiful,’ she said. ‘You might want to take a look.’” Eight years later, Denny wrote his thesis at Harvard on this very mosque, whose “decoration came at a crucial moment in Ottoman Turkish art in the 16^th century.” Forty-three years later, this fall, he’s doing an exhibition at the Textile Museum in Washington on this same period in which Turkish art changed suddenly.

Although Denny is quick to note, “I wanted to be a teacher since I was two,” he has always divided his time between academia and museum-work. He’s worked for the Harvard Art Museums, the Smith College Museum of Art and, for the last five years, the Met.

Every good art historian has to know something about museums because that’s where the art is. They used to ask the bank robber, Willie Sutton, why he robbed banks and he said ‘because that’s where the money is stupid!’ And it’s true…There’s a group of art historians today that believe that theory is their province and that they shouldn’t have to deal with things and quite frankly that’s an attitude that has come into graduate schools and it’s just as wrong as wrong can be.

Denny travels from Amherst, Massachusetts, to New York every week. His involvement with the Met began nearly five years ago, when a colleague asked Denny if he had a student interested in working on the museum’s Ottoman Turkish art. Denny decided that he himself was interested. He was especially excited to research a particular carpet that had been deemed fake by four art historians and warehoused. He smiles, telling me “It’s one of the greatest carpets they’ve got and in another couple of months it’ll be on display.” (He’ll be giving a lecture on it this week at the museum.) Denny has also worked on the Met’s website, photos, educational materials, tour-guide training and audio guides.

For the new Islamic galleries, he “worked with conservators, designers, helped to write the labels, wall texts and provided photographs.” He’s proud of the galleries’ architecture, which serves to contextualize Islamic art, he feels. The courtyard was made by Moroccan craftsmen and the Damascus room is “a room right out of a palace in the 18^th century.” Generally, it seems that “people really love [these areas].” Although some critics believe museums shouldn’t present architectural reconstructions, Denny defends them. “The museum really told [the craftsmen] what we wanted. That is, we had art historians and professionals do all the planning and then the craftsmen executed it according to what we wanted.” Denny said that “the biggest surprise [he] had was how smoothly things went. There were so many people working on this, so many people on the team and they were so diverse. It was a very nice surprise.”

Denny’s appointment at the Met was originally planned to end with the opening of the galleries, but he was asked to stay, to help rotate the collections. Preserving the objects requires replacing silks every three months, wool every six months, and so on. The museum’s Islamic collection consists of 12,000 works, ten percent on view at a time. Accordingly, the tours, audio, and wall text must also change. So it seems that Denny will stay for years to come, studying the art of his fascination.

I asked Denny if the events of September 11, 2001 changed the museum’s plans for the galleries. As he explains,

They went right ahead with their plans and pretty much what we have there today is what they intended to have all along…I think people are more interested than they would have been, but the Met’s mission is pretty clear. The museum is careful not to have a political agenda and I think it works. These questions were all asked by reporters and Philippe de Montebello, who of course was there when I wasn’t, stated very clearly and unequivocally that this has been in our plans all along. This is not a response to political events. The museum is simply doing what the museum does.

Denny says he hopes the galleries will help to accurately inform people about Islam. He says that the department’s “new mantra is ‘from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean,’” meaning that Islamic art is not monolithic and exists in many different cultures – “Arabs, Turks, Persians, Indians, all kinds of ethnic groups, all kinds of languages.” He notes that there is secular Islamic art, not just religious, and that despite popular belief there are many human and animal figures. Most importantly, however, is the understanding we gain of the people, who as Denny explains “are just like us. Some of them are fun loving, some of them aren’t, they like to laugh, they like to have a good meal and a good time and even lift a good glass, which they’re not supposed to do. And the art helps to show this.” The galleries have been well received. In their first four months 360,000 visited, an extraordinary number for such a small section.

Still thinking about his year abroad at age fifteen, he tells me toward the end of the interview, “What really astounded me at the beginning was not how different Istanbul was from Grinnell, Iowa, because it certainly was different, but once I got to know people, how very similar they were.”

“Many thanks to #CAA2012 for the amazing panel with Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster.”

“Lev Manovich encourages CAA to embrace the intersection of art history and art practice.”

“Academic publishing as a colonization of intellectual property.”

“Very first panel on art history meets digital humanities – congrats! Let’s hope they will continue dating.”

“Publishing most vertical thing in academia, approaching colonial scale, next year we will reach one trillion in student debt.”

“Provocative and inspiring comments from Terezita Romo about categories of “hybrid” & “universal” at PST and Chicano Art panel.”

“F1219 – yes, everyone in the rooms has memorized the library of congress call number for Pre-Columbian art history.”

“This panel was an invigorating breath of jet-lagged-yet-fresh air and a vision of moving beyond the dead-end rhetoric of the copyright cartel, consumer culture, and commodity art.”

“You probably don’t want to hear about the truly bizarre but interesting talk by Carolyn Tate comparing Mesoamerican sculpture to miscarried fetuses and ancient mosaics to fertility cycles. You probably also don’t want to hear about how I also lost my temper a bit in a question and answer session on Jeff Koons.”

“Looking forward to warm sunshine…”

“I’ve seen so many people knitting during sessions. Is there a group art project happening that I’m not aware of?”

“I’ve heard rumors of a cage match between art history profs and painting profs tomorrow.”

“If the panel is not good, I’ll be devastated. Hard to suck the fun out of Polke.”

“How many people would watch a web stream of a CAA panel?”

“David Antin confronts mystery of Duchamp’s sugar cubes–and art itself–in acceptance speech…”

“A whole panel with ‘no talking allowed’ – excited for this silent format focused on visuals”

“This is like the art history Oscars...”

“This Rosalind Krauss session at #CAA2012 is PACKED! Morbid curiosity?”

“‘That was sooo graduate student’ – overheard at #CAA2012″

“So listen closely, Grasshopper, as I parse my infinite CAA wisdom into some key points…save the sweet talk for quiet moments…don’t put all your jpegs in one basket…I can now identify the conference dress code as thoroughly ‘biz cas’…Surrounded by aesthetics, it might appear very pure and civilized, but under the surface we’re dealing with the sordid world of ‘networking.’”