As if a $220 million makeover weren’t enough, the Frick Collection in New York City has enlisted comedian Steve Martin to promote the newly reopened museum, which returned to its Fifth Avenue headquarters this spring.
In a new video posted to the Frick’s website and social media, the Only Murders in the Building co-creator and actor prances around the freshly renovated Gilded Age mansion, narrating a short history of the museum and its originator, the industrialist and notorious labor suppressor Henry Clay Frick.
“Consider what you or I might be drawn to on any given day at the Frick Collection,” Martin begins in the six-minute video. “Maybe it’s a gilded beard,” he suggests, as the camera pans to capture the lush facial hair of a 15th-century Hercules sculpture.
During its five-year renovation, the museum temporarily relocated its collection of Old Master paintings and decorative arts to the Brutalist Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue, the former home of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Following its reopening in April in its original home, 231,972 people have visited the updated Frick Collection, according to a museum spokesperson.
“This is what the Frick Collection is for: for slowing down, following your eye, and getting closer to objects of beauty and awe that are always right here, waiting for us behind these historic doors,” Martin says in drawn-out, inflected sentences. (The category of “us,” of course, is restricted to those who can drop $30 on a museum visit.)
A Frick spokesperson told Hyperallergic that Martin was a good fit because he is “a longtime member and fan” of the museum as well as “an iconic figure in New York City.” It’s also worth mentioning that the actor is a seasoned art collector. Martin once described collecting as his “biggest hobby,” in part because paintings are so different from his chosen vocation. His private collection reportedly includes works by Picasso, Francis Bacon, and Roy Lichtenstein, and he also authored a 2010 novel set in the contemporary art world.
Martin may or may not be the most fitting choice for the face of the Frick, but his experience solving museum heists as the clumsy Inspector Jacques Clouseau in The Pink Panther (2006) certainly lends some ironic charm to his latest starring role.
