“Originally the show was going to cover even more than 550 years of art history; it was going to encompass thousands of years of art history,” laughs Kelly Baum, a recent curatorial appointee at the Met, who was charged with the portion of “Unfinished” exploring the beginning of the post-war period up to the present. For Baum, this span enables both a richer and more accurate understanding of our present moment. “There are many museums out there that show modern and contemporary art, and the majority, I would say, focus on the 20th and 21st centuries,” says the curator. “The drawback is that they can’t contextualize the work that they show. That presents a distorted view of the art of the past century and the art of today. It creates the impression that today’s art sprung fully formed from the heads and hands of artists, when in fact it has art-historical DNA.”

Grayson Perry

The Met’s project reflects a challenge that other encyclopedic museums have grappled with in recent years: how to make their less-fashionable, pre-modern collections of art relevant for younger audiences and bring the cultural artifacts of the past to life? Contemporary artistshook up the British Museum ’s holdings a few years back by inserting his works into the ages-old collection, and San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum has been similarly contextualizing their extraordinary collection with new work in order to make their holdings relevant to a contemporary-hungry audience.

Renaissance contemporary But this growing trend—of juxtaposing old and new—signals something deeper and less cynical than a marketing strategy. In the globalized, digital present, with the whole world (and archives of the past) at our fingertips, the largesse of Big Art History is arguably more illustrative of a shift in perspective—an impulse toward a greater inclusivity and generosity of vision, one that sees history as running alongside the present, thealongside the