Malcolm Rogers: shaking up the museum world

Ever since the Tea Party of 1773, Boston has experienced ambivalent feelings towards the English. And never more so than towards Malcolm Rogers, expat director of its beloved Museum of Fine Arts since 1994.

For more than a decade the press queued up to take potshots at him and his attempts to bring the museum into the 21st century, calling them "vulgar" and "low-brow".

Now all is forgiven, following the announcement that Rogers has earned the museum $500m (£321m) from his wheezes. As a result, he's been able to employ the London-based architects Foster + Partners (they of the new Reichstag and British Museum glass courtyard) to help him spend it. "Building the New MFA" is the most ambitious museum project in the US. I'm in Boston, checking out the maverick with the Midas touch.

Things threaten to get off to a rocky start when I fail to realise that the large man in the faded salmon pink cords and soft moccasins shadowing the PR girl is my man. Someone whispers that he's come in especially on his day off; hence no trademark Savile Row suit. He shakes my hand apologetically, then we're off.

Immediately, Rogers transforms into this Tigger character, scurrying past all the masterpieces, gesturing breathlessly at walls which will soon be spirited away, opening up to vast new gallery spaces, not to mention a Foster glass-covered courtyard which is being built beyond. The very floor we're standing on, he says, will extend right under the new Art of the Americas wing, which will include south and central American art, too. When it opens in 2010, its 50 rooms will make it the largest such gallery complex in the world. We sweep into the glacial new information centre, where he pauses beside the row of "concierge screens" to explain how visitors can use them to check through the collection, create "electronic post cards" of exhibits, and make bookings at theatres, cinemas and MFA events. These include "Winesdays" (wine-tasting events); art movies (a recent example came complete with incest, teenage sex and ghosts); and College Nights ("live music, DJ dance party; treasure hunt" – the mind boggles). As Rogers says: "I believe in stimulating all the senses, not just the visual."

Turn the clock back 15 years, and you find a different Malcolm Rogers. One who's worked his way up to deputy directorship at London's National Portrait Gallery, but is best known for seeking out "sleepers" at the auction houses on behalf of the museum. His most spectacular find is a portrait of Charles II as a youth by Van Dyck, bought for £2,500. When the director's post became vacant in 1993, Rogers put in for it, only for the trustees to appoint an outsider, Charles Saumarez Smith.

This snub was the making of Rogers. Or perhaps we should say the makeover of him. When he emerged from his cave after licking his wounds he was an altogether steelier proposition. Hearing that a firm of headhunters had been employed to find a new director at Boston, he picked up the phone and dialled.

Following years of bad management, the MFA was in financial straits. Opening hours had been cut back to save money; the outgoing director had closed down the grand entrance on Huntington Avenue as a "sign of suffering", as Rogers puts it today. With nothing more than a vague pledge to court "as broad a public as possible" and to cling to the museum's "philanthropic roots", Rogers got the job, the first British director for 100 years.

First, he threw open those doors. Then he extended opening hours, inviting in everyone aged 17 or under for free. Next he shook up the fusty exhibition programme, kicking off with a show of celebrity photographs by Herb Ritts. You know the sort of thing: Madonna smooching with a wall; Naomi up to her armpits in leather boots; Cher's butt, complete with tattoos. "Low-brow trash!" the critics howled. Long queues started snaking their way through the galleries. The cash registers started to ping.

"Speed, Style and Beauty" followed, in which the classic cars owned by fashion designer Ralph Lauren were presented on plinths. This time the cry was "But is it art?" One thing was certain: Rogers was reaching a broader public.

But the biggest flak was reserved for "Things I Love", starring the wine bottles, Impressionist paintings and yachts of Oxbow energy group magnate William I Koch. As there wasn't enough room inside for those yachts, Rogers plonked them on the lawns outside.

Meanwhile, the old-guard staffers were up in arms. Rogers pre-empted them all by informing two senior curators that he was creating a series of "super-departments", where visual and applied art would be lumped in together. Unfortunately, their posts had been abolished, along with those of 17 administrators. The press called this episode the Boston Massacre. Everyone held their breath, waiting for the blood to start flowing. Today Rogers, who lives alone, admits he had sleepless nights. In the event, nothing happened. The tide had turned. Now there was no stopping the maverick at the helm of the MFA.

His next bright idea was to rent out 21 Monet paintings from the collection to the Bellagio hotel and casino in Las Vegas. When he took a charabanc full of trustees along to the Sunset Strip to see them in situ, a reporter from The Boston Globe went with them, running an almost affectionate piece afterwards, describing him at the gaming tables, mastering the game of blackjack.

By now, Rogers was beginning to dream of leaving a more permanent legacy. In 2003, the year the Queen awarded him a CBE for services to America and the UK, he applied for American citizenship and then launched his building project.

For some time now, the flow of gifts had been on the increase. Rogers had created the museum's first collection of antique silver, while boosting its contemporary art holdings. The "new MFA" project quickly gained momentum. By the deadline, in June this year, no fewer than 52 of the museum's 90 trustees had coughed up at least $1m a head. Rogers is listed among the benefactors, as is his yacht-owning friend Koch.

Lunch is ending. Rogers is off to stay with some benefactors. Before he leaves, I ask whether he has any tips for his cash-strapped museum colleagues back in the old country. First and foremost, he says, they must start lobbying the British government to copy the American system of tax incentives for benefactors. By encouraging a "culture of giving" he says "their investment would quickly be paid back many times over".

Second, they must lift the ban on deaccession (the selling-off of holdings), not only to "get rid of the junk" but to create revenue for purchasing new artefacts. Rogers himself recently bought a major work by Degas by this process. And it's not just "all those Attic vases" languishing in the storerooms which should go, but the "90 per cent of contemporary art which will not last either physically or in terms of taste".

Finally, museums everywhere should learn to share more. Why is it, he asks, that the safer it has become to transport works of art, the more "cautious" curators have become about lending?

As for research, "the electronic revolution means you can make a discovery in the morning and share it with your colleagues on the other side of the world in the afternoon. The answers to one museum's questions could well lie in another museum's storeroom." But whereas the MFA has 200,000 images on its website for all to see, other museums have a fraction of that amount. "They're afraid of losing control. But you can't control."