When I got the call that William Wegman and his wife, Christine Burgin, wanted to give us his complete career in video—174 works made between 1970 and 1999—I almost fell out of my chair. We had acquired two major multipart photo works from him in recent years and had invited him to pick a work from the Museum's collection to discuss for our online series The Artist Project, but it hadn't occurred to me that a gift might be in the offing. It is a tremendous honor to be the keeper of these great works for the future, and my first thought was to show them all as soon as possible, alongside those aforementioned photo works and two-dimensional works by his contemporaries already at The Met.

Distilling the nearly six hours of video we received into a compact ninety-minute program was more difficult than I thought, particularly because the quality level is so consistently high. What I wanted the audience to come away with, other than being entertained, puzzled, and even moved, was that art could be both serious and funny, thought-provoking and freewheeling. The shortness of the videos—most are the length of a pop song—was shocking in its time, when video often meant subjecting the audience to the full duration of the tape. Using the structure of the skit, Wegman constructed the narratives around their endings, which often reverse expectations that he had carefully built up throughout the piece. Today we are in an artistic moment in which editing—the sometimes-painful boiling down of one's message to its purest form—is woefully lacking in literature, film, and visual art, these videos are a master class in compression and brevity. They are the soul of wit.

In addition to the video work, Bill and Christine offered us two more photo works and ten drawings, so that we would have a good, representative collection of Wegman's tripartite efforts in video, photography, and drawing at the moment in the early 1970s when he found his mature style and voice. I cannot thank them enough for their boundless generosity, the results of which are on view through July 15, 2018, in the exhibition Before/On/After: William Wegman and California Conceptualism.

It is rare for a curator to hear peals of laughter coming from his or her show (and if you do, it may not be a good sign!), so it has been a heartening experience during these anxious times to see the pure pleasure that William Wegman's videos bring people. Today I saw a bunch of small children burst into cheers and applause when Man Ray, the artist's Weimaraner collaborator, finally loosed a dog treat from a bottle. It's these kinds of experiences that make having this incredible collection of Wegman's work at The Met so satisfying. It allows us to share his work with a vast audience of people from all over the world, and that's a real gift.