The easiest way to describe this exhibition is "The meeting of two Mets," with the Metropolitan Museum of Art Tokyo serving as a venue for 133 works from its much more renowned New York version, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, known simply as "The Met."
But despite all its fame and grandeur, and the copiousness of a collection that includes more than 2 million works, the New York institution shares the major defect of American culture, namely an all-embracing universalism that works against a unique and easily marketable cultural identity.
Exhibitions drawn from the collections of the Louvre, Prado, or Tretyakov, instantly evoke their countries' rich cultural histories. This is much less true of the Met, where the global clearly eclipses the national.