ART MARKET / Invitation to a temple: Geraldine Norman meets the Met's donors, dining in dynastic style

HOW do you get to dine in the Temple of Dendur? You must be rich, socially acceptable, interested in art - and in New York. The sandstone temple, dating from about 15BC, was erected on the banks of the Nile by Emperor Augustus in honour of the goddess Isis.

It was one of the Nubian monuments threatened with submersion after the building of the Aswan dam, so Egypt gave it to the American government. The temple was transported, stone by stone, to New York where a new wing was built on to the Metropolitan Museum to accommodate it.

The museum, with one sloping glass wall that virtually incorporates the temple into Central Park, was paid for by the late Arthur Sackler, an avid art collector who made a fortune from the manufacture of Valium and similar drugs.

The temple, surrounded by potted palms and an artificial lake, metamorphoses at night from art exhibit to magnificent dining-room. Next month, for example, it will be the scene of a fund- raising dinner for the museum's Costume Institute. The cost of dining on that occasion will be dollars 9,000 ( pounds 6,000) a table, or dollars 900 a head. The temple can accommodate up to 500 guests.

Getting people in at those kinds of prices requires a big commitment to art by the very rich. The organising committee, all of whose names are printed on the invitation card, comprises the wives, widows or daughters of 38 millionaires. It includes Mrs Henry Kissinger, Mrs Gordon Getty and Mrs Anne Eisenhower-Flottl - a granddaughter of the former American president, married to an Austrian banker who amazed the world two years ago by paying pounds 6.05m for a Degas in the middle of the recession.

In New York, art acts as a potent chemical agent that transforms money into social acceptability. If you buy enough art and give some of it to museums, you are invited to the best parties - many of which are at the Met.

This modern alchemy is performed courtesy of the American tax system; the cost of dining at the Met can be set against income tax, as can the donation of an art collection, the sponsoring of a curatorship or financial aid with the central heating. In these conditions, art-collecting begins to mean something subtly different from collecting art.

The Costume Institute Benefit is to celebrate the opening of an exhibition entitled 'Diana Vreeland: Immoderate Style'. Vreeland was one of the big names in fashion for more than 40 years. She was fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar from 1936 to 1962, editor of Vogue from 1962 to 1971 and special consultant to the Metropolitan's Costume Institute from 1972 to 1989. Her leitmotif was exoticism and romance, plucking style from the past without nostalgia. 'Nostalgia - imagine]' she once said. 'I don't believe in anything before penicillin.'

In order to pull the younger element into the fashionable party, an after-dinner reception with dancing will be held in the pillared entrance hall from 9.30pm to half-past midnight. The cost? A mere dollars 125 per head.

There is a subtle pecking-order between parties, depending on who is picking up the tab. When the new 19th- century galleries were opened in September, described by director Philippe de Montebello as a whole new museum within a museum, it was the Met which paid for the party in honour of the galleries' chief benefactors, the Honourable and Mrs Walter Annenberg, Mr and Mrs Gerald B. Cantor and Mrs Janice H. Levin. And so they should have, considering the money that the trio had lavished on the museum.

Walter Annenberg, the publishing tycoon and former ambassador to Britain, gave dollars 5m towards the renovation but, more impressively, he has also bequeathed the museum his collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist pictures. Worried, perhaps, that it wasn't going to look quite good enough, he bought Van Gogh's Wheat Fields with Cypresses for dollars 57m earlier this year and gave it to the museum. He also gave them 50 per cent of Picasso's Au Lapin Agile of 1905, for which he paid a record- breaking dollars 40.7m at Sotheby's in 1989.

The 50 per cent sounds odd this side of the Atlantic but is quite normal

in America. Gifts come in percentage chunks from year to year, depending

on how much income tax the donor needs to offset.

Gerald Cantor, whose fortune is based on bond and money trading, owns the world's largest collection of Rodin sculptures; four of the museum's galleries and the roof-garden are named after him and his wife, Iris, since they paid for the furbishing. They have also donated a great many Rodins. Mrs Levin is the latest recruit; she recently described to the Wall Street Journal how her late husband, Philip J. Levin, a wealthy property developer, started on art: 'He was a man who said 'I want to collect paintings - Get 'em.' ' Mrs Levin gave the Met dollars 3m towards renovating the galleries and has pledged them a Sisley, a Pissarro and a Degas on her death.

The party to end all parties started with cocktails in the Petrie Court, an elegant sculpture gallery, and moved on to the Temple of Dendur, where dinner was served to 400 guests.

The temple is not the only after-hours dining-room - only the largest. The Charles Engelhard Court in the Met's American wing seats 300, the Carroll and Milton Petrie European sculpture court 250, and the Blumenthal patio 150. For those who want to go medieval, 250 guests can be dined at the Cloisters, an outstation of the Met. Opened in 1938, it is pieced together from bits of five French monasteries, transported, like Dendur, stone by stone to New York. A summer dinner in a real French cloister is quite something.

A few very special patrons are allowed to give their own parties at the Met. Jayne Wrightsman, widow of an oil millionaire, sometimes gives intimate parties for 20 or so in the French 18th- century galleries which she gave the museum. She has also donated many Old Masters and once gave a dinner in honour of Lord Rothschild when he was chairman of the trustees of our own National Gallery.

Special events apart, the privilege of dining at the Met can be bought. The Chairman's Council holds three dinners a year; while many of the most connoisseurish patrons are members of this council, you only have to contribute dollars 35,000 per annum to qualify for membership. For corporate patrons, dining- rights are slightly more expensive; you have to pay dollars 40,000 or more a year to qualify for the privilege of entertaining business guests at the Met.

Corporations pay for their own parties, of course, which means more money for the museum; as the publicity handout for corporate patrons puts it: 'Let the Metropolitan Museum share with you, your colleagues and your clients the rich splendor of its art.'

Museum parties, like those of the Met, are standard practice for American museums - the Met is only the largest and grandest dining venue or, as it prefers to put it, 'the greatest art museum in the western hemisphere'. The practice of benefactor parties goes a long way to explain the relentless flow of expensive art across the Atlantic.

(Photograph omitted)