Albright-Knox Post Mortem: A Complete Defeat

On the Wall Street Journal's "Leisure & Arts" page today---coinciding with the first day of a series of auctions of 207 objects from the collection of the Albright-Knox Gallery---former museum administrator Tom Freudenheim publishes his second WSJ piece decrying the sales. (Here's his first piece, in which he described the importance to him, as a boy growing up in Buffalo, of the earlier, non-contemporary works in the collection that have now been deemed disposable.)

A quasi-journalist nowadays, Freudenheim managed to crash the no-press barrier at the recent museum members meeting where the sale was debated, because he is a longtime Albright-Knox member. In today's piece, he gives an inside view of that meeting and debunks the notion that "this failing Rust Belt community can raise money only by divesting itself of its cultural capital because there's no new wealth to tap. In fact, I've...been told that there are massive fortunes in the region, many of them made locally."

This underlines an important issue that is all too common to the sorry sagas of museum deaccessions: They are an easy expedient for trustees and administrators who aren't doing their job of adequately supporting their institutions with their own gifts and through energetic fundraising.

Freudenheim writes:

Some of those millionaires [in the Buffalo area] are even trustees of the museum. In the old days, writing big checks to support acquisitions and other museum programs was considered every board member's first responsibility. Today, it seems, they prefer to cash in the gifts of earlier generations.

Freudenheim also raises questions about today's museum officials' overruling the considered judgment of their predecessors: "A significant number of the [deaccessioned] masterpieces...were quite intentionally purchased by previous distinguished directors," he notes.

Having lost the battle, he nevertheless optimistically opines that "this storm in Buffalo might be just the beginning of a revolution in which the public begins to reclaim its rights to public institutions and demands an accountability that museum directors and trustees will ignore at their peril."

But the Buffalo example provides little evidence of this so-called peril: The trustees and director appear to have gotten away with their raid on the collection, with the support or acquiescence of most of the local community. The Battle of Buffalo, it seems to me, was nearly a complete defeat.

We need the Michael Govans of this world---respected museum directors who are not afraid to lead the charge against deaccessions---to begin to set things right. The only other hope is that State Attorneys General begin forcefully intervening on behalf of the public for whom museums hold their collections in trust.

So far, there are few signs that either of these things are going to happen any time soon.