ADAA Panel: Lowry Indirectly Responds to His Critics

Here for your literary exegesis is the text of the CultureGrrl-Glenn Lowry Q&A at yesterday's ADAA-sponsored panel discussion on museum collecting, which I referred to in yesterday's post:

Rosenbaum (addressing the entire panel): You spoke a bit about the symbiotic relationship among collectors, artists and museums in order to help form collections. Where do lines have to be drawn between symbiotic and something that's subject to possible conflict of interest and abuse? I'm thinking partly of the partial funding of Glenn Lowry's compensation through individual trustees, which we just learned about in the Times. Are there potential conflicts? How do you guard against such problems?

Kathy Halbreich (director of the Walker Art Center): He was probably their best acquisition.

Panel Moderator Tom Eccles (executive director of Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies): I'll take another question.

I thought that ended that, and I was left with a very large omelet all over my face. But then, much later, Lowry addressed me directly, at the end of his answer to another provocative question: Lisa Dennison, director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, had risen from the audience to challenge the proliferating phenomenon of "friends" groups, consisting of American benefactors providing financial support for foreign museums. With such perks as dinner at Tony Blair's house offered to Friends of the Tate, "what's a poor American museum director to do?" she plaintively queried. (Chatting to me afterwards, she joked that in asking such an impertinent question, she was trying to imitate me. Talk about bad role models!)

At this point, Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, unchivalrously pummeled the poor American museum director, as only the British can, with a cleverly dry and sarcastic reply about how sorry he felt for the Guggenheim and how flattered he was by her question. Lowry subsequently chimed in with more temperate support of "friends" support groups. Then he unexpectedly returned to my earlier question, on which he had previously been silent:

Lee mentioned the issue of how do you insure that the boundaries are well understood, so that public museums don't become the preserve of private patrons, although they're always going to have an intersection with private patrons, because the majority of works of art in any art museum come from gifts. In the case of the Museum of Modern Art, the tradition has been that no one curator, and certainly not the director, has the authority to accept a gift or for that matter to buy a work of art.

He went on to note that a committee of the board must vote on each acquisition, and "it is not unusual that a work of art is not approved."

In other words, while not responding directly to the controversy over his accepting supplementary compensation from a private foundation funded by individual trustees, he did seem to be saying that any theoretical conflict of interest the director might have would not be enough in itself to compromise museum actions.

I'll let you be the judge as to whether that response satisfies. I'm still hoping for more comprehensive comments. But for the moment, I was relieved that some egg got wiped off my face. Adopting Serota-ian rhetoric in this post would be churlish. Maybe tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I need to thank Lisa for informing me yesterday that the Guggenheim has now (finally!) put the names of curators up on its walls, giving credit to the authors of its exhibitions. Do I get to take some credit for these credits?

And will more museums follow suit?