Lamentable 2006 Artworld Developments---Part I: Rent-a-Show

Let me now spoil your New Year's revels with my perverse countdown of the two 2006 artworld developments that I will continue to rue in the coming year:

The first is growing international participation in the pernicious spread of museum rental shows---high-priced loan exhibitions that allow the lender, a major museum, to alleviate its money problems at the expense of sister institutions. The art-needy exhibition venues are desperate enough for crowd-pleasing masterpieces to pay big bucks for the privilege of showing them.

No lesser voices than Françoise Cachin, former director of French national museums; Jean Clair, former director of the Picasso Museum, Paris; and French art historian Roland Recht recently railed against "using works of art as currency of exchange" in rental shows, such as Louvre Atlanta. In their Dec. 13 joint article, Museums Are Not for Sale, in the French newspaper Le Monde, they also decried proposals by the Louvre and the Pompidou to create foreign satellite museums in the manner of the Guggenheim, which they hyperbolically decried as "the disastrous pioneer of paid exportation of its collections to the whole world."

Ironically, they also praise Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum, for what they call his "stern warning" in 2003 against the "unrestrained commercialization of the public patrimony, particularly by the system of loan fees for works."

Maybe the news hasn't yet reached France about Masterpieces of French Painting from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1800-1920, the megabucks rental show touring next year to the the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

At least we still have the positive role model of the generous Clark Art Institute, whose Masterpieces from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute is dispatching (for a fee based only on cost) 12 of its most celebrated Impressionist paintings to small museums around the country.

As for the rest of you sorely tempted museum directors...no one ever listens to Polonius' tedious advice, but here it is anyway:

When it comes to Rent-a-Show, "Neither a borrower nor a lender be."

COMING SOON: Lamentable 2006 Artworld Developments---Part II