Art on a New Level.(Mori Art Museum)(Brief Article)

David Elliott is the talk of Tokyo. At gallery and museum openings around town, people rush over to shake his hand and chat. Most of the major newspapers have profiled him. As the first director of the Mori Art Museum, slated to open a year from now, he has the difficult task of launching a major cultural institution from scratch. But the main reason he's become the center of attention is that Elliott, a British art scholar and veteran curator, is the first gaijin, or foreigner, to head a major Japanese museum.

The Mori isn't just another place to admire van Goghs. When it opens, it will be the world's tallest museum, occupying the top two floors of a 54-story tower in downtown Tokyo which will anchor a major commercial and residential development project, the brainchild of billionaire builder Minoru Mori. The museum will also benefit from a high-profile partnership with New York's Museum of Modern Art, paying an undisclosed sum for access to MoMA's permanent collection, plus consultation on gallery design, exhibition planning and installation.

While Western directors and senior curators at top museums may hop from one country to the next, Japan has rarely been a stopping point. For centuries Japanese have prided themselves on their artistic sensitivities, repeating the claim that they are so unique that no foreigner is capable of understanding their culture. When American Alexandra Munroe organized a survey of postwar Japanese art for the Yokohama Museum in 1994, art critics pounced. "[Foreign curators] are incapable of understanding the physiological depth of Japanese artists," wrote one.

That attitude is beginning to change, thanks to the achievements of gaijin in other fields. When Brazilian-born Carlos Ghosn took over the stalled Nissan Motor Co. in 1999 and turned it around within two years, he became a national hero. More recently French soccer coach Philippe Troussier led the Japanese team, which had previously not won a single World Cup match, to the Cup's second round. Explaining his choice of Elliott over Japanese candidates, Mori said last year that given the recent misfortunes of many Japanese museums, dozens of which are going out of business every year, it was "time to bring in outside know-how."

Elliott has been out of place before. After serving as director of Oxford's Museum of Modern Art for 20 years, he became the first non- Swede to hold the top job at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, expanding ...