Glenn Lowry's Sweet Deal

This makes me very sad: an article posted minutes ago by the NY Times that might well bring down the directorship of Glenn Lowry of the Museum of Modern Art and seriously tarnish the reputation of a museum that is already being exhaustively interrogated, for other reasons, by investigators for the Senate Finance Committee.

Lowry's compensation was, according to the Times, sweetened with $5.35 million over the period between 1995 and 2003, which came to him through a trust funded by four big-money collectors: David Rockefeller, Agnes Gund, Ronald Lauder and Laurance Rockefeller.

Aside from the serious legal and tax issues this raises, which are discussed at length in Stephanie Strom's article, there are major museum-ethics questions: Should the director of a museum, particularly one as powerful as MoMA, be personally enriched by and beholden to individual collectors (or ANY individuals, for that matter)? The conflicts of interest are potentially enormous.

Here is the "Additional Compensation Information" for Lowry that MoMA provided to the IRS, dated Jan. 5, 2007. It details only "some of the payments," according to Strom (who describes others), and goes back only to 1999.

I can only hope that MoMA and Lowry have a good explanation, which they provide publicly and promptly. I'm all in favor of generous pay for directors of major museums. But secret supplementary payments funneled to them by private individuals don't, at first whiff, pass the smell test.