The Director And The Pharaoh: How Thomas Hoving Created The Museum Blockbuster

“The first blockbuster museum show to be so labeled, a traveling loan of funerary objects [under the title ‘Treasures of Tutankhamun’] that brought in 8 million visitors nationwide and filled Egypt’s coffers with gift-shop profits, was unprecedented. It was an ancient-art exhibit that was also a pop-culture moment … [And] no one did more to bring Tut to the States, or indeed to bring museums into the larger world of marketing and commerce, than the Metropolitan Museum’s director, Thomas P.F. Hoving.”