The Cooper-Hewitt also announced the appointment of Cara McCarty as the museum's new curatorial director.

And they await his choice of a new curatorial director who will oversee the museum's four curatorial departments.

Presently, he is curatorial director for the first 798 Beijing Biennale 2009.

As Barbara Bloemink, curatorial director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, put it, fashion can "both sense and influence."

"Nearly everything is stored in the mansion and in two attached brownstones," said Barbara Bloemink, the curatorial director of the Cooper-Hewitt.

Darts is curatorial director of Conflux, the annual art and technology festival for the creative exploration of urban public space.

Barbara Bloemink, hired last year by Mr. Thompson from the Guggenheim and Hermitage Museums in Las Vegas to be curatorial director, has invited guest curators.

"He was a great furniture designer," said Barbara Bloemink, curatorial director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in Manhattan.

"The cliche around here is that if you can inspire the Jimi Hendrix of the future, you've done your job," said Chris Bruce, the museum's curatorial director.

It was Paravi Wongchirachai, the design center's "knowledge and curatorial director," who assuaged my concern that, well, maybe all this development is just rampant Westernization.