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Met Director's Retirement Ends Curator Era

The announcement last month that Philippe De Montebello is retiring has led to a spate of articles describing him as the last of a breed.

De Montebello has led New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art for 30 years. He started as a curator of European paintings and has always maintained that the art should be the primary concern of an art museum.

But times have changed and today's museum directors are as likely to be CEOs as they are curators.

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Margot Adler died on July 28, 2014 at her home in New York City. She was 68 and had been battling cancer. Listen to NPR Correspondent David Folkenflik's retrospective on her life and career