At its best, tapestry is a mesmerizing art form, but it's an aspect of art history that has been largely overlooked by scholars. If you pick up any standard history of European arts, it's all about painters, sculptors, and architects. This exclusion of tapestries from the narrative of art history, however, is not an accurate reflection of the importance of the medium in shaping and defining the style of some of history's most influential artists. While Raphael and Rubens, for example, are among the most exceptional of painters, their designs for tapestries are every bit as remarkable. The truth is that few artists rarely work with just one medium. During the Renaissance in particular, tapestry was the most important figurative art, collected by the wealthiest and most powerful patrons, and was therefore a medium in which prominent artists strove to work.

The Met addresses one such remarkable artist in the exhibition Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry, on view October 8, 2014, through January 11, 2015. Coecke was truly a Renaissance master of all disciplines who achieved immense fame in his lifetime, though in the literature the overwhelming genius of his tapestry designs is often bypassed in favor of critique of his panel paintings and drawings. Certainly, to many of his contemporaries, Coecke's most admired works were his tapestry designs. In Grand Design, the breadth of Coecke's work is explored by reuniting nineteen of his most beautiful tapestries with more than thirty of his prints and drawings and seven of his panel paintings.

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It is a great day for the Met and a great day for the City of New York. More than a century after the completion of the Met's Fifth Avenue facade and forty years after its last plaza renovation, the Museum has revived one of the great outdoor spaces in New York.

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I'm pleased to announce the launch of the Met app created by the Museum's Digital Media Department. This free digital resource is the easiest way for the Met community, both local and global, to stay current with what's happening at the Museum every day—wherever you are.

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The Met's 82nd & Fifth web feature redefined the online museum experience: in two-minute episodes, one hundred Met curators talked about the work of art that changed the way they see the world—one curator, one work, two minutes at a time. That content is now available on an iPad app in twelve languages. You can download, favorite, and share episodes, and create your own collections.

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The art at the Met reaches across the globe, so we wanted to start providing our collection information in some of the many languages represented by these cultures. Our new web feature One Met. Many Worlds. brings you more than five hundred collection highlights in eleven languages: English, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

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I am delighted to announce the launch of the Met's latest web series, MetCollects. This multimedia feature gives you an intimate look at some of the hundreds of works of art that the Met acquires each year. These exciting new additions are introduced by the curators who proposed them for the Met's collection.

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I arrived in Davos this year ready to talk about the critical relevance of culture within the World Economic Forum's annual meetings. But one thing was lingering in my mind and became a critical part of my discussions there. Last November Bill Gates did an interview with the Financial Times newspaper. In it, he said that it was morally questionable to give money to an art museum when there are still diseases that cause blindness in the world. While I greatly admire Mr. Gates's work as a significant philanthropic catalyst, this particular perspective seems limited and counter to the very priorities that he champions in his charitable work.

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We just posted my episode, entitled Breakthrough, as part of 82nd & Fifth, the award-winning web series that has introduced our audience and our curators to a whole new way of looking at works of art: one object, one curator, two minutes at a time. I chose one of my favorite masterpieces—a Bernard van Orley tapestry of The Last Supper from 1524—and was amazed by the stunning details that Met photographer Peter Zeray was able to capture. This is the 75th of this 100-episode project, and I hope you take some time to enjoy them all.

The situation in Syria is both grave and deeply troubling. In the midst of such striking human suffering, all other concerns can easily get lost in the shadows. But we must believe that there will be a time when peace returns to Syria, and when that moment arrives, it would be tragic to find that most of the country's heritage had been lost.

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