April 2007 Archives

Where are the new leaders of nonprofit arts organizations and institutions going to come from?

According to Involving Youth in Nonprofit Arts Organizations: A Call to Action, a report just issued by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, there's a crisis approaching:

As baby boomers in the arts approach the end of their careers, nonprofit organizations must act quickly to establish a flow of new, qualified, energetic leaders and decisionmakers to take their place. This entails both offering new opportunities for youth involvement and also converting that involvement into long-term commitment. For the field to be green again, arts professionals must develop strategies today to turn interns into administrators, volunteers into board members, and audience members into active supporters.

The report blames "declining participation in the arts by young people" as the cause for a coming arts leadership crisis, and offers various strategies for "engaging the next generation."

I did my bit last weekend, by giving my son and his girlfriend our tickets for last Saturday's sold-out NY Philharmonic performance (while we were in Seattle). He told me it was "fine, but not something I'd do every day." And now he's back to trading emerging-market bonds.

Which brings me to the glaring omission in the foundation's report: It completely ignores a major reason why smart and ambitious young people don't enter the ranks of arts administrators: They can make so much more money somewhere else.

That's why, unlike many, I don't look askance at million-dollar compensation packages for outstandingly important arts executives (provided that proper procedures for awarding and spending such munificence are strictly adhered to). And that's why I think we're going to lose the best and the brightest to the corporate and financial worlds, unless we can find a way to make careers in art nonprofits more financially rewarding.

UPDATE: Click here and click the link below for readers' responses.

It didn't make the NY Times' online company news page and but the gray lady has finally introduced a general culture blog, ArtsBeat. It's about time that Virginia Heffernan's Screens, a blog about online video (heavy on YouTube) had some company on the newspaper's online Arts page.

So far, the arts blog, launched Friday, has confined itself to dispatches by Ben Ratliff and Jeff Leeds, doubled-teaming the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California, and Jon Pareles posting from the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

Is the new blog going to be limited to play-by-play events coverage? Stay tuned, as they say.

Will visual arts be deemed ready for online prime time? Probably not, if the status of visual arts on the Times home page is any indication. Listed under "Arts" in the lefthand column that delineates the paper's areas of coverage are books, movies, music, television, theater. And visual arts (not to mention dance, design and architecture) are...where?

Michael Kimmelman, before you go off to Europe, why not get them to rectify this small oversight?

Click the link below to read the press release announcing the Barnes Foundation's rather long shortlist of architects to design its new facility in Philadelphia. I wish that architects of conscience would boycott this project, but the commission is too much of a plum.

In other Barnes news, it just announced the award of a $5 million challenge grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (to be matched by $15 million), to help establish a permanent endowment to support scholarly activities connected with the Barnes collection and archives.

In November, I took the J. Paul Getty Trust to task for the shockingly skimpy one-page financial summary in its belated 2005 annual report.

The 2006 report, which it had promised "at the beginning of 2007," has now been published, and the good news is that it provides detailed statements of financial position, financial activity and cash flow (pages 100-103).

The bad news is that the Getty ran huge operating deficits in the past two years: $47.85 million in 2005; $18.29 million in 2006.

The good news is that with an endowment of $5.6 billion, rising to a level it hasn't seen since 2000, the deficit probably doesn't make much of a dent.

Now I'm off once again to the Seattle Art Museum, where I will hear John Walsh, former director of the Getty Museum, speak to the press and artworld VIPs, who have arrived in town to see the new museum and schmooze at a gala tomorrow night.

Should I ask him what he thinks about current finances and past finagling?

Got my notebook, got my pens, got my camera, got my beloved Sony ICD-SX25 digital recorder, got lots of questions.

Ain't got no hot water in the hotel shower (but, hey, you can't have everything). Good thing I'm not a travel writer.

Now I'm off to the expanded Seattle Art Museum, which means I've got no more time to post.

Are you ready, Mimi and Brad?

Renzo Piano and his cohorts "swooped into town last week," according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, to discuss ideas for the new Kimbell Art Museum annex.

Mary Rogers of the Star-Telegram reports:

The architectural team arrived with a box filled with a variety of site plans that included not the single plot of land where the newest addition will rise, but the entire museum neighborhood. First one plan and then another was presented.

Few details of the Kimbell's ideas and plans have been released, but if Piano is involved, we assume there's got to be a piazza in there somewhere. Here's what Mindy Riesenberg, the museum's head of media relations, told me recently:

The entire building will be funded by the Kimbell Art Foundation. I have no idea at this point what it will cost, as we have no clue how big it will be, what it will include, etc. We're just in the early stages of discussing what we will need the building to do for us. As for connecting to the Kahn building, we're still talking about that: Could be a tunnel. Could be a bridge. Could be nothing.

Right now, the main purpose of the new building is to house special exhibitions, but we may also show some of our permanent collection from time to time, and we're talking about moving our library and the education department over there. There may also be another cafe or restaurant of some type. We may also have facilities that can be rented out (unlike in the Kahn building), but again, this is all just speculation right now and we have made no final decisions.

A major building project by a world-architect that requires no capital campaign, just a check from the supporting foundation? Now that's rich!

Remember this?

I guess that Barry Diller wears the pants at his new Gehry-designed IAC building in New York, because the billboard advertising "the boyfriend trouser" is no longer blocking the view of the structure from the south.

But when I drove by last Friday night, around 9 p.m., I was startled to see the interior of this bulky building completely lit, top to bottom. What's more, the ground floor glowed a lurid red.

A striking sight, to be sure. But this is no Empire State Building and it seemed a waste of energy for the sake of vanity (unless the entire staff was working really late, or a party was in progress). Maybe the "green" police need to tone down the mogul's red glare.

"I'm going to Seattle," I told a friend yesterday.

"You're going to see what?"

CultureGrrl readers probably already know what I'm going to see.

But I'm bound by my usual Wall Street Journal gag rule, so I can't tell you about the main thing that I'm going to see in Seattle before I tell the WSJ's readers.

Judging from what happened when I went to Boston, I'll probably find something else there to write to you about.

For most of today, though, I'm going to be up in the air. (Some of you probably wish I would stay there.)

Apparently my highlights tour, posted Friday---images of important works in the Metropolitan Museum's "permanent" display of Greek and Roman art that are not there permanently---created confusion in some readers' minds:

The Modern Kicks blog expressed uncertainty the next day over whether I was "trying to imply that there's something unusual or not proper about their presence there."

I applaud high quality loans that enhance the Met's galleries. I was merely trying clue in my readers to some fine works that they might otherwise overlook: They are non-objects in the Met's publicity and catalogue, and have been largely ignored in articles about the show (which generally publish Met-provided photos as illustrations). The Met has chosen to emphasize the works that belong to the Met.

The controversies surrounding some of the loaned objects or the lenders is also newsworthy: Some objects were successfully claimed by Italy; some are owned by Shelby White, who herself owns objects being claimed by Italy; some by Michael Steinhardt, who some years ago was ordered to forfeit an ancient Sicilian gold phiale (platter) because he had misstated its country of origin and value on the Customs declaration.

Just letting you know.

To squelch recent speculation that it has changed its position on sending the Parthenon Marbles to Greece, the British Museum on Friday issued this official statement, which essentially restates its longstanding objection to releasing the frieze to Athens:

The Trustees have for years been looking to see if there is any reasonable ground on which a way forward with Greek colleagues might be constructed. To date, this has sadly not proved possible. Among many problems has been that successive Greek government have publicly disputed the Trustees' unquestionable legal ownership of the sculptures.This has made any meaningful discussions virtually impossible.

The Trustees have lent often to Greece, especially in the recent Athens Olympic year of 2004, but they have never received a normal loan request for any of the Parthenon sculptures. What successive Greek governments have always sought is the permanent removal of all of the sculptures to Athens. The Trustees do not foresee a situation where they could possibly accede to such a request.

It appears to me that Martin Gayford's recent speculation in Bloomberg that comments by the British Museum's director, Neil MacGregor, offered "the basis for some sort of compromise" was little more than wishful thinking.

First, back home today from a perfect weekend visiting my graduate-student daughter, making a poor attempt at golf with the more adept duffers of my family. Why do foursomes behind us keep hitting into us? Are they trying to tell us something?

We also met my daughter's new boyfriend, whose name is Lee. My son's longtime girlfriend, Lisa, is nicknamed Lee. And CultureGrrl's name is... This could get very confusing. I know I'm a great role model, but this is ridiculous!

I'll have one day home, and then it's off to the land where this house is situated and where many persons named Gates (including an art museum director) reside. I'll be there on assignment until Sunday and may be posting sporadically, as time permits.

Please raise a mouse to me some time today:

It's CultureGrrl's First Anniversary!

I must confess that no one read CultureGrrl for the first two weeks: I did it without telling anyone, to see if I liked it. For better or worse, you see that I did.

Then I sent the URL to a few people I respected in the artworld. The reaction was uniformly positive, except for one blog-averse traditionalist, who later admitted the error of his ways and is now among my biggest fans.

It's been difficult but rewarding. I hope I can keep it up!

In a situation reminiscent of the Parthenon Marbles contretemps between the British Museum and Greece, Egypt is asking the Altes Museum, Berlin, for a temporary loan of its famed bust of Nefertiti. Both museums are understandably leery of lending to nations that have previously insisted that ownership of these antiquities should be transferred to the source country.

Agence France-Presse reports:

[Culture Minister Bernd] Neumann and the Altes Museum in Berlin have rejected Cairo's calls for a loan, saying Nefertiti was too delicate and valuable to be transported.

Zahi Hawass, director of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, suspects the real reason behind Germany's refusal is the fear that Nefertiti will never be returned---a fear that he asserts is unfounded.

Yet, it was just a year ago, at a press preview at the Metropolitan Museum, that Hawass listed the bust of Nefertiti among several supremely important Egyptian antiquities that, as he then told me, he would insist on being permanently returned to Egypt. He made the same threat then that he is making now, this time as his fallback position if Nefertiti is not lent---the creation of an alliance with other source companies to demand the return of key works.

Is it any wonder that Berlin might be loath to lend?

This just in from the Athens News Agency, regarding the flurry of premature excitement over the supposed softening of the position of British Museum director Neil MacGregor on the question of whether the Parthenon marbles might be temporarily reunited in the nearly completed Acropolis Museum:

[Greek] Culture Minister George Voulgarakis on Thursday commented..., "I read with great interest the statement by Mr. MacGregor, but there is nothing official at this moment apart from the pre-determined meeting in London, under the auspices of UNESCO, on May 4, with representatives of the Greek and British Culture Ministries and of the British Museum on the issue of the exhibition of the Marbles in Athens."

My guess is that the Greeks will never formally affirm the British Museum's ownership, and that the legally trained MacGregor will be loath to lend without an ironclad stipulation of ownership. The fear is that once the marbles are installed near the Parthenon, the Greeks will never let them leave. Imagine the protests on moving day.

The renewed speculation about the marbles was prompted by Martin Gayford's recent report on Bloomberg that MacGregor had revealed he might be willing to lend the marbles, if Greece would explicitly acknowledge his museum's ownership.

The Greeks have previously expressed willingness to disregard the question of who owns what, as long as the British dispatched their portion for longterm display in Greece.

My 2002 NY Times Op-Ed piece, Reassembling Sundered Antiquities, says what I think should happen---"alternating long-term displays of the reunited marbles at each venue."

But don't hold your breath.

(Part I is here.)

Below are some of the objects that you won't see reproduced in today's NY Times piece by Michael Kimmelman. The newspaper's chief art critic uses the final installment of the reinstalled Greek and Roman galleries as an occasion to propagandize for the Metropolitan as a "universal museum." (Can't we just call it the "encyclopedic museum," and leave Mars and Pluto out of it?)

You also won't see these objects in the voluminous, sumptuous catalogue of works from the Met's collection, Art of the Classical World, published as a companion to the completed galleries. This, despite the fact that some of these works are among the highlights in those galleries.

That's because these "permanent galleries" are not entirely permanent: Quite a few of the finest pieces are, in fact, on temporary loan.

So let's take a quick tour of a few objects you should see now, because you might not be able to catch them later. (Loans from private collectors are for two years, renewable, according to Met curator Seán Hemmingway):

Bronze Statue of a Man, Greek, Hellenistic, ca. mid 2nd-1st century B.C., Collection of Shelby White and Leon Levy

The Getty has its Greek Statue of an Athlete; the Met, at the entrance to its new galleries, has this similarly posed, imposing statue, loaned by collector/benefactor Shelby White. Both statues are reminiscent of Lysippos, but produced later. (The Getty has rethought its previous attribution of the bronze to Lysippos, and now says that it is by an unknown Greek sculptor, working in the 2nd or 3rd century B.C.)

Marble Head of a Horned Youth Wearing a Diadem, lent by Renée and Robert Belfer

Another piece featured right by the entrance, next to the bronze statue above. The bull's horns are missing; the quality, intact.

The Hellenistic Silver Hoard, including 16 objects that will be returned to Italy by the Met.

The Met calls these objects "the Hellenistic Silver Hoard"; Italy calls them the "Morgantina Silver." Either way, 16 of the objects in this case were owned by the Met and will be going back to Italy, according to the terms of their negotiated agreement. Italy claims that the pieces were illegally removed from its soil and its borders. The Met, a reluctant repatriator, asserts on its wall label that it "is not convinced that the [Morgantina] provenance is correct."

Silver-gilt Medallion, Representing Scylla, Greek, South Italian or Sicilian, 3rd century B.C., Lent by the Republic of Italy

The most strikingly beautiful piece from the case above (top shelf).

Left to right: Shallow Silver-Gilt Bowl, Greco-Parthian, Hellenistic, 2nd century B.C., Collection of Shelby White and Leon Levy; Silver-Gilt Rhyton, Greco-Parthian, Hellenistic, 2nd century B.C., Collection of Shelby White and Leon Levy; Silver-Gilt Rhyton, Greek, Late Classical or Early Hellenistic, ca. 4th century B.C., Lent by Judy and Michael Steinhardt Collection

Three major loans from major collectors in the Met's Hellenistic Treasury, which also includes the "hoard," above.

Bronze Head of a Young Man, late Hellenistic, ca. 2nd-1st century B.C., lent by Judy and Michael Steinhardt Collection

From the Met's label: The artist clearly lavished considerable detail in the making of the wax model for this bronze, to create a highly individualized work that was undoubtedly an expensive commission.

And, as I told you on WNYC earlier today, don't forget to say a fond farewell to the celebrated Euphronios Krater (down the hall, to the northwest of the new galleries), which has a one-way ticket to Italy next year. It embodies an important argument of the archeologists---that we lose important information about an object when it is taken from the ground by non-professionals whose motive is profit, not scholarship: As the Met's label tells us, one of the puzzles about the krater is why "an enemy of the Greeks should be featured on such a large and fine vase produced by one of the leading Athenian artists." Would archeological context have given us some clues?

We'll never know.

The link at which you can hear what I said on this morning's New York Public Radio news program about the Metropolitan Museum's new Greek and Roman galleries is here (or you can click below). It's not on the "Morning Edition" page of WNYC's website---the link that I gave you yesterday. They bumped me to the station's homepage!

I must confess that I have not heard myself yet, so let's listen together, shall we? My CultureGrrl persona is well developed, but my radio persona is still a work in progress.

Remember, I've also got a second post on the new galleries (first is here), COMING SOON.

J.M.W. Turner, "Glaucus and Scylla," Kimbell Art Museum (again)

O my prophetic soul!

In my post last June, As the Turner Turns, I wrote this about the Kimbell Art Museum's restitution of its only work by that artist, which was found to have been seized from its World War II-era owners by the Nazis and sold at a 1943 auction of "Jewish property":

Maybe, as often happens, the heirs will ultimately decide to sell the work, and the Kimbell will get another shot at it---but at a price greatly enhanced by the Kimbell's own imprimatur.

Told you so! This just in from Christie's:

"Glaucus and Scylla," a magnificent oil on panel by J.M.W. Turner, had been restituted to the heirs of John and Anna Jaffé by the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas last year. During the morning session at Christie's Rockefeller Galleries, Richard Feigen successfully bid $6.42 million on the lot to buy it back for the Kimbell Museum.

Get that painting back up on your website, Mindy!

Leon Levy and Shelby White Court, Pre-Ribbon Cutting

Shelby White (left) Chatting with Philippe de Montebello

It was one of those quintessentially celebratory New York moments: Gov. Spitzer and Mayor Bloomberg (not to mention the famously beleaguered benefactor, Shelby White) were on hand Monday morning to cut the ribbon for what is undeniably one of the Metropolitan Museum's most spectacular spaces---the new galleries for Hellenistic, Roman, South Italian and Etruscan art, opening to the public tomorrow.

The breathtaking two-story atrium provides the grand finale to the museum's renewed and reinstalled classical art galleries, which, all told, were 15 years and $220 million in the making.

My first glimpse of the new Leon Levy and Shelby White Court came Monday, pre-ribbon cutting, when the space was peopled only by its ancient denizens. I gasped at the beauty of the ambiance, the installation and, especially, the quality of the combined natural and artificial light that seemed to bring the inanimate statues to life. The Met's designers have dazzlingly evoked the elegant environs of a Roman villa, without creating a jarringly fake space for real art, as so often happens when museums dabble in cheap atmospherics.

That said, this is not, to my mind, the most spectacular part of the Met's classical art collection. There is, therefore, a disconnect between this grand space and the quality of what's in it, relative to the more consistent high quality of earlier works in the less spectacular spaces leading up to the Levy and White Court. The parts of the Met's Greek and Roman collection that I return to again and again are the holdings from earlier periods---the prehistoric Cycladic pieces and, of course, the sculptures, reliefs and ceramics from the high classical period, 5th century B.C.

The just-opened galleries pick up the chronological story with Hellenistic, Roman and South Italian art. The time frame is roughly from Alexander the Great to Constantine the Great (336 B.C. to 337 A.D.), although the new display also encompasses the museum's Etruscan holdings, extending further back in time (including the celebrated 6th century B.C. chariot).

In this case, architecture is destiny: The last part of the Met's classical chronology naturally falls to the southern end of the Met's vast building, with its grand space pre-ordained by the original McKim, Mead and White layout. The sheer vastness and almost bewildering multiplicity of the collections on display here insure that there will be works of lesser quality competing for attention with such masterpieces as the Badminton Sarcophagus, resplendent with high-relief carvings of Dionysus and sundry bacchanalians.

One of the Met's PR blockers effectively (and physically, with a gentle push) ran interference between me and collector/benefactor Shelby White (pictured above chatting with director Philippe de Montebello before the ribbon-cutting) who, as a sometime journalist herself, must have known that the press would be pressing. (Some $20 million for the Met's classical galleries came from White and her late husband, Levy.) I did, however, manage to ask White about the status of negotiations over some works in her collection (not at the Met) that have been claimed by Italy. She cheerfully replied that her discussions with Italy are "continuing."

As I said today in my New York Public Radio (93.9 FM; 820 AM) commentary about the new galleries (airing tomorrow on Morning Edition; audio link to come), I'm not among those who demonize White for her past antiquities-buying transgressions. Her acquisitions of works lacking clean provenance have been more high-profile than those of her collecting colleagues (including others whose collections are now owned by the Met) largely because of her outsized munificence towards exhibitions and scholarship. I think she deserves some points for that.

COMING SOON: CultureGrrl's mischievous display of classical art that's IN the Met, but not OF it.

Robert Cooper

Kudos for Tennessee Attorney General Robert Cooper, who is earning a place in the pantheon of CultureGrrl heroes for his handling of the proposed Fisk University deaccessions.

Elizabeth Ulrich reports in the blog Nashville Scene [via]:

In a motion filed Monday in the Davidson County Chancery Court, Cooper's asked for permission to intervene in the lawsuit [between Fisk and the O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe], for the art's sake. He says neither Fisk nor the museum are representing the interests of the people of Tennessee, the "true beneficiaries of Miss O'Keeffe's charitable gift." If the court doesn't allow him to intervene, as his motion outlines, Cooper says his ability to protect those interests and the collection will be greatly impaired.

According to the motion, Cooper wants to make sure that the university explores "all possible strategies to preserve the collection in its entirety at Fisk." If that's not possible, he's going to try to make sure that [O'Keeffe's] "Radiator" never hits the auction block. He says the painting "is clearly the signature piece and heart of the Stieglitz Collection." He'd rather see Hartley's "Painting No. 3" or another piece of the collection go.

On Tuesday, I had told a Seton Hall University class that nonprofit institutions hold their collections in the public trust, but that most State Attorneys General, whose job it is to protect the public's interest in the public patrimony, have (with few exceptions) taken a laissez-faire posture towards art disposals and towards the enforcement of donors' wishes (as in the Barnes Foundation case, where the judge publicly admonished the Pennsylvania AG for not rigorously questioning the necessity of deviating from Albert Barnes' wishes).

I'm very glad that, in this instance, Cooper may prove my cynicism about our public watchdogs to be wrong.

Meanwhile, as Reginald Stuart notes in Diverse: Issues in Higher Education:

Beyond the art sale and stepped up alumni giving appeals, Fisk has not articulated a grand plan for fundraising from local, state or national sources.

Maybe it's time they thought harder about furdraising the right way, instead of the easy way.

You'd think these people might know better:

Daniel Grant reports in the Maine Antique Digest that among the empty-handed investors who filed suit against Bruce Taub, CEO of the belly-up art hedge fund, Fernwood Art Investments (scroll to second item), were: Ashton Hawkins, former secretary, counsel, and executive vice president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and president of the American Council for Cultural Policy; William Pearlstein, a New York arts attorney and a member of ACCP. Grant reports that their investments in Fernwood were $150,000 and $200,000, respectively, as disclosed in court papers.

Individually and through ACCP, Hawkins and Pearlstein have been very active on the side of U.S. collectors and dealers in the antiquities wars. This should create some schadenfreude in the archeologists' camp.

More details of this sorry art-for-profit debacle are here.

The quest to tame the Museum of Modern Art's monstrous atrium continues. Its best use so far was the installation of Jennifer Bartlett's 1976 "Rhapsody," which fit so well that it looked as if the work had been created for the space. After seeing this last May, I commented that "this success suggests that MoMA's intimidatingly cavernous anteroom might best be conquered by commissioning site-specific works, as done by the Tate Modern for its enormous turbine hall."

Now MoMA has announced that it has commissioned a site-specific work---"What Happened to Us?"---from Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi for the atrium (but limited to one wall):

Perjovschi...will spontanously draw witty and incisive social and political images in response to current events, allowing global and local affairs to inform the final result. Beginning on Apr. 19, he will start drawing on the wall while the Museum is open to the public, allowing visitors to observe the creation of the work.

That's an enviably high-profile venue for the artist's first solo museum show in the U.S. And the performance aspect of the piece may even help to humanize a space that has almost invariably been described as cold and corporate.

MoMA's "Projects 85" sounds like a good (even courageous) idea on paper. Let's see how it works on the wall.

I didn't get what I wanted: I had applied for an available faculty position in the arts journalism program at my alma mater, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and got rejected Monday. They have a "don't ask, don't tell" policy about the reasons behind their decisions, but I suspect my lack of university teaching experience didn't help me.

I put that behind me, as best I could, and prepared for my university teaching debut the very next day at Seton Hall, South Orange, NJ. Out of the blue, two months ago, Steven Miller, an adjunct faculty member and executive director of the Morris Museum, Morristown, NJ, had asked me to be a "surprise guest" at his seminar in the Graduate School Program in Museum Professions. He assured me that his class would be "very excited" when they discovered that their mystery visitor was CultureGrrl.

More than a little dubious, I walked in, sat down at the desk in front of the room, and saw that the class was uniformly nonplussed. They were expecting Philippe de Montebello, maybe?

Then Miller announced, "Our guest speaker today is CultureGrrl." Everyone's face instantly lit up and I was engulfed in a gush of warm welcome. I guess I don't look like that picture of me in the right column, relaxed and windswept in Colorado.

For my topic I chose "Whose Collection Is It?" as a springboard for examining a succession of hot-button, thorny issues in collections management---responsibilities of trustees and staff, donor restrictions, fractional gifts, copyright, moral rights, claims by victims of theft (including Nazi vicitims and heirs), antiquities claims by source countries, the State Attorneys General's actions (and lack thereof) in protecting the public patrimony.

I was startled and impressed with the students' breadth of knowledge (including some rather technical legal concepts) and the insightfulness of their questions and comments. Who needs the Ivy League?

Afterwards, when the students took a break before their next discussion, I asked how I could improve CultureGrrl, figuring they know more about the online world than I do. The consensus was that my blog needed more interactivity.

Point taken: I have always welcomed comments sent by e-mail, some of which I post as BlogBacks. I now plan to add a permanent call for e-mailed comments in my righthand column. I hope to append a wider variety of reader responses than I have previously published, which you will be able to access by clicking a link at the bottom of the relevant post.

The students said I have a "classy blog," and I hope for some classy comments. Theirs was a classy class, and as an empty nester, I reveled in the too infrequent chance to have quality time with an enthusiastic (and even admiring) group of young people.

On Monday, I didn't get what I want. On Tuesday, I got what I need.

Donn Zaretsky, in his indispensible Art Law Blog, almost (but not quite) grants my legal argument that American-based, foreign-museum "friends" groups are "mere conduits" of U.S. donations to foreign institutions and that contributions to them, and therefore are not properly eligible for U.S. tax deductions.

Why didn't I follow my father's footsteps to Harvard Law School?

Are there any U.S. museum lawyers out there who want to tackle this discussion? Many years ago, I mentioned my objections to Ashton Hawkins, then secretary and general counsel at the Metropolitan Museum. He disagreed with me, too, drawing the analogy to other U.S. groups that support international causes.

New assignments for CultureGrrl's silly syllabus:

---"Erudite" foodie Jonathan Gold in LA Weekly on Home of the Porno Burrito, fodder for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. (How can I possibly top his take on the potato taco?)

---Tyler Green's needed screed in Modern Art Notes on the aftermath of the Pulitzers

---Georgina Adam in The Art Newspaper on The Changing Landscape of the Art Market

---The J. Paul Getty Trust's 2006 annual report, just posted.

The answer is [drumroll]...Ellen Futter.

Hers is not one of the many names that have been bandied about in the press for the top spot at the embattled Smithsonian Institution, and perhaps she's too committed a New Yorker to make the move.

But for 13 years Futter has been quietly and effectively running a large institution with strong similarities to the Smithsonian---the American Museum of Natural History. For 13 years before that, she was the highly regarded president of Barnard College. Maybe 13 is her lucky number for career transitions.

If I used "quietly" to describe her management style, it was not because she has ever failed to be outspoken and persuasively articulate on hot-button scientific issues of the day. (I am thinking, for example, of her forceful debunking of religious fundamentalists' anti-evolutionism, in connection with the museum's recent "Darwin" show.)

But in a tough museum town, where every misstep is scrutinized and magnified, Futter has somehow managed not to be embroiled in public controversy. The closest she came was the kerfuffle over the museum's ownership of the Willamette Meteorite: This ended in an amicable agreement with the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon (ceremonial signing above; Futter on the left), which kept the celestial rock in New York, while "enabling the Grand Ronde to re-establish its relationship with the Meteorite with an annual ceremonial visit."

That's not to say that she avoids making waves by going with the flow of status quo: She has presided over steady, incremental changes to her institution, most dramatically with the new Rose Center for Earth and Space (replacing the planetarium with a far more ambitious astronomical emporium), but also impressively with a steady stream of upgrades and additions to the displays at her venerable institution: the Hall of Ocean Life, Hall of Biodiversity, Hall of Human Origins, Grand Gallery, Audubon Gallery, 77th Street Façade Project, and the Discovery Room...not to mention the annual Butterfly Conservatory, a popular nine-year-old tradition.

Like the Smithsonian, Futter's institution encompasses art (cultural artifacts from around the world) and both the biological and physical sciences. It is as much a serious research institution as a destination for school groups.

Futter's résumé is fleshed out with her status as fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, member of the Council on Foreign Relations and former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. She's a lawyer who can sling the lingo of lawmakers.

But what I most like about AMNH under Futter is its dynamic and, at times, unflinchingly provocative exhibition program, which tackles big themes (i.e., Gold, in all its manifestations and meanings) and big ideas (Einstein, Darwin, The Genomic Revolution), from every conceivable angle, using a multiplicity of multimedia, artifacts and inventive visual aids. These blockbusters are brainbusters---stretching visitors' minds with new concepts and comprehension.

As for AMNH's finances, Jeremy Cooke of Bloomberg recently reported that Standard & Poor's has upped the museum's credit rating from stable to positive, thanks to "strong fundraising, stable visitor levels, reduced spending from its $250 million endowment and improving finances."

Futter's got the skills, the experience and the advantage of not being saddled with Beltway baggage. What I don't know is whether she's got the desire to do it.

So many loose ends, so little time:

---The broken link for viewing last Wednesday's Smithsonian hearings by the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration is finally working, writes Liz Horrell, on behalf of the Senate Webmaster.

---Denver Art Museum spokeperson Andrea Kalivas Fulton updates me on who will foot the bill for replacing and/or repairing the leaky roof on the Denver Art Museum's new Libeskind addtion: "It's our understanding that insurance will cover the roof."

---On the same day as the Metropolitan Museum of Art's press preview for its new Greek and Roman galleries (more on this later), the Indianapolis Museum of Art has issued a press release announcing its "moratorium on the acquisition of archeological objects which lack documentation of removal from their probable countries of modern discovery prior to 1970." This resembles the Getty Museum's policy and goes farther than the policy of the Association of Art Museum Directors---the guidelines which are followed by the Met. AAMD's policy recommends that a museum should not acquire an antiquity of uncertain provenance unless the object can be shown to have been "outside its probable country or countries of origin" for at least 10 years.

---In his first New York magazine review, former Village Voice art critic Jerry Saltz takes a nostalgic trip to "a time and place when the market had nothing to do with history and art was guided only by artists acting on their own."

---And the prize that Jerry always wanted, was twice a finalist for, but never got has just been announced: The 2007 Pulitzer Prize for criticism goes to [drumroll]...Jonathan Gold of LA Weekly, "for his zestful, wide ranging restaurant reviews, expressing the delight of an erudite eater." Erudite eater??? No wonder I'm gaining weight! (Speaking of which: Philippe, why did you tell me today that I should skip lunch so that I could squeeze between a column and a display case for the in-the-round view that I craved of a Greek volute-krater? Is my figure less than Greek?)

But I digress....Message to snubbed Pulitzer finalist Christopher Knight: If you can't take the heat, get into the kitchen.

Memo to all art critics: Get over it. The Pulitzer jury just isn't that into you.

(Let it not be said that I don't follow up on my stories!)

Two CultureGrrl readers, responding to recent posts (here and here), have sent me e-mails supporting the Tyler Green argument for the appropriateness of tax breaks for U.S. donors to American-based, foreign-museum "friends" groups. These are organized as 501(c) (3) organizations to provide U.S. tax deductions for financial support of foreign museums.

The proponents' favorite analogy is to tax deductions for disaster relief and humanitarian aid abroad. My partial response (more below) is that international relief efforts for dire situations carry more moral and legal authority than boosting foreign museums' endowments, facilities and collections.

Now, Donn Zaretsky, in his Art Law Blog, has entered the fray, mostly on Tyler's side, although he grants that "it's a complicated question" and advances a plausible legal argument for my viewpoint.

There's one thing, though, that puzzles me in Zaretsky's pro-"friends" group analysis. He advises us:

U.S.-based nonprofits may (1) engage directly in charitable activities overseas and (2) re-donate funds they receive to foreign charities (in the latter case, as long as the intermediate U.S. charity is not deemed to be a "mere conduit").

Isn't "mere conduit" a perfect description of these "friends" groups, whose raison d'être is to funnel tax deductible U.S. donations to foreign institutions?

What's more, one might even argue that humanitarian aid to foreign countries is more appropriately eligible for tax deductions than aid to foreign museums, according to the very language of the government's original rationale for allowing deductions for donations (as quoted by Zaretsky): Tax deductible donations have a U.S. public purpose, because they can provide our government with "relief from the financial burden which would otherwise have to be met by appropriations from public funds," in the words of the legislative history of the Revenue Act of 1938.

Our government does provide funds for humanitarian relief abroad, so private contributions may lessen or at least supplement such public expenditures. As far as I know, there's no line in our federal budget for the Tate Gallery or the Louvre. If our government has not seen fit to support foreign museums directly, why should it do so indirectly through tax deductions?

More blogs (Modern Kicks, which agrees with me, and Edward Winkleman, who doesn't) weigh in here, here and here.

At the end of a flurry of CultureGrrl posts (here, here and here), in which Lee Rosenbaum, Alex Ross and Anne Midgette named our picks to succeed Lorin Maazel as the NY Philharmonic's next music director, I issued a plaintive query:

Anthony Tommasini, where are you?

At last, almost three months later, the NY Times' chief music critic has cautiously tipped his hand. He did it so subtly and discreetly that some, including the widely read music blogger Opera Chic, have misinterpreted his ruminations as an endorsement for CultureGrrl's (and Opera Chic's) pick, Riccardo Muti.

In fact, Tommasini argues that while the Philharmonic "plays splendidly for this exciting Italian maestro [Muti],...he hardly seems the type of artist who could reach young audiences and foster relations among emerging composers." Tommasini clearly takes these perceived deficiencies seriously, and seems to opt for Alan Gilbert ("a refreshing choice") or "the superlative" David Robertson (whom I recently heard conduct a lackluster Philharmonic performance).

Tommasini also mentions that "the musicians are known to have been especially impressed by the fiery Italian Riccardo Chailly and the elegant young Frenchman Ludovic Merlot."

I say we go with the guy for whom the Philharmonic "plays splendidly," give him some time, as well, to bestow his extraordinary operatic talents upon the Metropolitan Opera, and engage an up-and-coming associate conductor to focus on the adventurous experimentation part of the picture.

UPDATE: In his blog, The Rest Is Noise, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross argued yesterday that music critics should use a little reverse psychology in publishing their NY Phil picks.

Today Tyler Green eloquently takes the other side of an argument I raised about whether the U.S. tax code should be used to help funnel American funds to foreign museums.

This is accomplished through "friends" groups that are established in the U.S. as 501(c) (3) U.S. charities, giving them full tax-exempt status. That allows donors to get the same financial benefits that they would in donating to U.S. institutions.

He makes me seem positively xenophobic, and his view is probably the majority one. But to me these organizations, while well intentioned, are contorted contrivances that allow foreign charitable purposes to masquerade as American ones. I have no quarrel with Americans' donating to good causes in other countries; I'm just not sure that should trigger American tax benefits.

I'd be interested to hear what the lawyers have to say about all this.

Since I'm an Edith Wharton fan and I am planning to write a biography (but not of her!), I went to hear Hermoine Lee, an Oxford University English professor, speak at Columbia University this evening about her just published biography of the novelist. I wanted to learn some tricks of the trade.

I arrived early at Low Library and took a seat in the third row of the nearly empty rotunda. Soon afterwards, a professorial man in a tweedy brown jacket sat down in the seat right next to me, which struck me as odd, considering that he might have been expected to leave an empty seat between us in such uncrowded circumstances.

I glanced at him, thought he looked vaguely familiar, couldn't place him, and went back to working on some writing. (I now blush to think he might have been looking at the page.) Fifteen minutes later, along came my husband, who sat down in the seat on my left. The "professor" soon moved one seat over, laying his coat across the seat between us.

When Hermoine Lee took her seat onstage, I noticed her nod in greeting to the man on my right. Then, the person who introduced her mentioned that she had once written an essay on Philip Roth.

And then, of course, I knew.

I cast a sidelong glance at "the professor," and realized the person I had studiously ignored while I continued my own scribbling was arguably our country's most famous living literary novelist (especially with Kurt Vonnegut, whom my husband and I had been discussing, memorialized on the front page of the newspaper on my lap). Well, there's also John Updike, who, as it happens, has just published a review of the Wharton bio in the latest New Yorker.

I had just missed the opportunity to have a 15-minute tête-à-tête with the perpetrator of Portnoy. After the Wharton talk concluded, I lamely inquired if he was Philip Roth and told him that it was nice to see him. He returned the pleasantry and was off to commune with the academic types up front.

Why do these near brushes with greatness always happen to me? I must be losing my nose for news.

DAM's Staff Before the Cuts: Preview Party of the New Hamilton Building, Sept. 10, 2006. Photo by Brendan Harrington and the DAM photographic services department.

This has been a bad news week for Daniel Libeskind: First this report of suspected arson at his first completed building, the Felix Nussbaum Museum in Germany. (Karsten Luecke, a CultureGrrl reader in Germany, today alerted me to this article, in German, from Schwäbische Zeitung Online, which quotes the comment by the museum's director, Inge Jaehner, that "nothing happened to the pictures or the interior.")

Now this report from Architectural Record that the roof of Libeskind's recently opened addition to the Denver Art Museum couldn't keep out the Colorado snow.

Kelly Davidson writes:

Construction crews are preparing to start permanent repairs on the roof of the new Frederic C. Hamilton wing at the Denver Art Museum. The roof began leaking as a result of record-breaking snowfalls this winter....

Crews will likely replace much of the atrium's existing roof....Though plans for a permanent solution are still in discussion, the museum hopes to have the problem resolved by the end of summer. The price tag for repairs is undisclosed at this time.

This roof razing comes on top of other signs of financial strain at the Denver museum. According to the museum's most recent annual report, for the year ending Sept. 30, DAM had already sustained a "planned deficit of $2.9 million in the operating fund, which was a result of expenses incurred to outfit and staff the Hamilton Building. The museum anticipates that the majority of the planned deficit will be recouped with revenues from the expanded complex."

Or maybe not. On Monday, the museum issued this press release:

The Denver Art Museum has implemented changes to bring staff levels into alignment with the ongoing program and operation of the Museum. Thirty staff members...took advantage of a voluntary resignation program offered by the Museum nearly two weeks ago. In addition to the voluntary resignations, the Museum has eliminated an additional eight positions effective this week. These reductions total approximately 14%; however, staffing remains 15% higher than pre-expansion levels.

This "budget tightening and staff reassessment" was prompted in part by attendance shortfalls due to "harsh holiday weather," as well as "soft revenues in some areas," according to the press release. But the need to come up with funds for roof replacement (unless the cost is borne by Libeskind) could be another significant budget buster.

These growing pains bring to mind the post-expansion financial difficulties related to another "wow" addition, Santiago Calatrava's Quadracci Pavilion for the Milwaukee Art Museum, which opened in 2001. And Denver's faulty roof brings to mind the customary complaint about Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings: Sometimes the edges of the "cutting edge" aren't watertight, and the "built experiments" don't quite work.

Now you can. The prepared statements by Smithsonian honchos are already up on the website of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration. And in her opening remarks today, Sen. Diane Feinstein wasted no time in calling for an overhaul of the Smithsonian's board. The GAO's Mark Goldstein was also on hand, to report on how the infrastructure is crumbing.

The link for viewing the hearing itself does not work at this writing, but hopefully Congressional tech support is rushing to the scene.

So if you can't wait for the pundits to weigh in (or you just want to form your own opinion), download the statements and start talking amongst yourselves.

...she tries again...and wins. Two Thomas Jefferson University Eakins sales done, one more to go---"Portrait of William S. Forbes."

And we still haven't heard whether the Philadelphia Museum will sell another Eakins, to help pay for "The Gross Clinic."

No messy price-matching grace period this time, and no sharing with the National Gallery (let alone a Philadelphia institution). It's off to Wal-Mart's headquarters city for "Portrait of Professor Benjamin H. Rand."

Meanwhile, Walton's Crystal Bridges, where all this bounty is headed, will open a program and exhibit space in downtown Bentonville, Arkansas, on June 16. The Moshe Safdie-designed museum is scheduled to open in Bentonville in 2009.

I don't know why this is happening, but I do know that it's happening: Christie's has cancelled its May 24 American Indian art auction, while Sotheby's has two such sales scheduled for next month: the Saul and Marsha Stanoff Collection, May 17 and a mixed-owner sale May 18 that includes a Zuni jar deaccessioned by the Albright-Knox Gallery.

Regina Kolbe of Antiques and the Arts has the scoop:

Christie's has abruptly cancelled its upcoming auction of American Indian Art, originally scheduled for May 24, releasing specialist Delia Sullivan and closing the department for an indefinite period of time. Although the auction house has yet to make a formal announcement, Toby Usnik, spokesperson for Christie's, stated, "The decision was made to cancel the May sale and suspend all American Indian Art sales in the foreseeable future."

More than 250 lots had reportedly been booked for the May auction and the status of each consignment is currently being negotiated by the auction house on an individual basis. According to Usnik, items are either being returned to the consignors or are being held by Christie's for inclusion in a future sale at that will offer related lots.

Usnik confirmed to me that Kolbe's report was accurate. He added:

As a general practice, we believe it is incumbent upon us to review and update our strategies based on evolving market needs. With regard to the middle market in general, Christie's remains fully committed to this market in all of our saleroom locations.

It was significant that he reaffirmed the commitment to the "middle market," because Sotheby's has announced a strategy to concentrate its focus on the higher end.

Usnik also denied that there were any problems with the objects in the cancelled sale or with specialist Sullivan, but provided no further insight into reasons for this precipitous move.

"Review details are proprietary and I am unable to share them," he said.

David Roche, Sotheby's American Indian art expert, wouldn't comment on the Christie's move, but was happy to beat the drum about his own department's success:

Sotheby's has been the leader in the sale of American Indian art at auction for 30 years. Last year, we held the highest grossing auction sale of American Indian art in history. In that same sale, we set a new world's record for the sale of an object of Native manufacture at auction---$1.8 million. In total, between our dedicated spring and fall 2006 American Indian art sales, we achieved nearly $12 million.

This is a statement that no U.S. museum officials could get away with, even if it might accurately reflect their thinking:

The British Museum is here to present world culture. In principle the trustees are against restitution because it would detract from that mission.

This from Hannah Boulton, the British Museum's spokesperson, reacting to a demand by President Imamali Rakhmonov of Tajikistan "that the British Museum give back a unique collection of ancient gold and silver artifacts discovered 130 years ago near the Oxus river" (as reported yesterday by Luke Harding of The Guardian).

The treasure, from the 4th and 5th centuries B.C., was excavated near Tajikistan's border with Afghanistan.

Boulton said that her museum had not yet received a formal claim for the objects, but she's already issued her preemptive strike. Most American museum officials would turn Boulton's statement around, saying that "in principle" they do not want stolen objects in their collections, but they disagree with some source countries' definitions of "stolen art" and on whether events occuring more than a century ago should trigger restitution today.

Speaking of which, on Monday I'll get to see The Chariot!

Nussbaum Museum, Osnabrück, Germany

A sad new development to contemplate at observances this Sunday of Yom Ha-Shoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day):

Agence France-Press reports that suspected arson has caused extensive damage to the wooden façade of the Felix Nussbaum Museum in Osnabrück, Germany, which opened in 1998 and was Daniel Libeskind's first completed building. The museum contains the world's largest collection of paintings and graphic art by Nussbaum, who was born in Osnabrück and died at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp.

According to AFP:

Investigators are treating the case as arson but said there was no indication it was politically motivated....Firefighters found a burning pile of fabric next to the building....Osnabrück has seen a rash of similar fires recently.

In describing the significance of this museum, Libeskind wrote:

The task of building a Museum to house the artistic remnants of Nussbaum's life raise issues which are not merely architectural but are indeed moral. I believe therefore, that the destruction of Jewish culture perpetuated by the Third Reich must not be dealt with solely in memorial terms. The remaining witnesses to the annihilation of European Jewry are now dying out. The paintings of Nussbaum are more than paintings. They are everliving documents which, placed in a new context of participation and a new witnessing, elevate the narration of history as art into the emblem of the very survival of the Jewish people and of European civilization.

No word from AFP about whether there was any damage to Nussbaum's "everliving documents."

UPDATE: Jessica Scaperotti of Studio Libeskind comments:

We were shocked and saddened to hear the news. Mr. Libeskind will of course do anything to assist in the process.

An article today from Agence France-Presse, quoting Kevin Ching, incoming CEO of Sotheby's Asia, contained so many puzzling "did he really say that?" moments that we can only hope it's the reporter, not Ching, who was confused.

First head-scratcher:

Kevin Ching says one of his aims as the newly-appointed chairman of Sotheby's in Asia is to see the first Asian bid for a European Impressionist piece.

This might come as a shock to the Japanese.

Second head-scratcher, presented as a direct quote from Ching:

In the contemporary market, the majority of buyers are western, not Chinese....Much of modern Chinese art employs the sort of communist imagery and Cultural Revolution imagery that western buyers are fascinated by but I think Chinese buyers find commonplace.

This might well come as a shock to Sotheby's itself, which reported that an overwhelming majority, 76%, of buyers for its record-breaking Apr. 7 contemporary Chinese art sale in Hong Kong were Asian, not western. And the majority of buyers were Chinese: 28.7% from Hong Kong; 26.3% from Taiwan, 12% from the People's Republic of China. What's more, the underbidder for Xu Beihong's "Put Down Your Whip," which at $9.2 million set an auction record for any Chinese painting, was also Chinese---a Shanghai-based art dealer and collector, Hua Yuzhou, who bid for the painting on behalf of another Chinese buyer, according to a report by Le-Min Lim of Bloomberg. (The winning bidder was anonymous.)

Third head-scratcher, again presented as a direct quote from Ching:

As Chinese people have become richer I think they have taken to associating themselves with China's powerful past, so they buy up the artifacts of the imperial periods. I wouldn't say this is the overriding reason they buy---they buy mostly as investments---but it is certainly in the back of their minds.

This may or may not be true, but it's impolitic, at best, for the new guy on the Asian art block to say that Chinese buyers are in it not for the love but mostly for the money.

Ching is new to the art trade: He came to Sotheby's in July from Dickson Concepts (International) Limited, a Hong Kong-based luxury goods group. He assumes his CEO post at Sotheby's Asia this month. The staff e-mail last May announcing his arrival said he would "be learning our business."

Maybe he's still learning.

Unmentioned in the excitement over the four breathtakingly ambitious starchitect museums being planned for Abu Dhabi are the serious human rights questions recently raised about construction workers' conditions in the United Arab Emirates.

In a report released last November, Human Rights Watch, an an independent, nongovernmental watchdog organization, charged:

As the United Arab Emirates experiences one of the world's largest construction booms, its government has failed to stop employers from seriously abusing the rights of the country's half million migrant construction workers....These abuses include unpaid or extremely low wages, several years of indebtedness to recruitment agencies for fees that UAE law says only employers should pay, the withholding of employees' passports, and hazardous working conditions that result in apparently high rates of death and injury....

"Hundreds of gleaming towers have risen on the backs of migrants working in highly exploitative conditions," said [Sarah Leah] Whitson [HRW's Middle East director].

Soon after HRW communicated its findings and recommendations to the UAE, its prime minister ordered the labor minister to institute reforms. Whitson remained skeptical:

We hope that the government's new promise to enforce its labor laws does not share the same fate as its broken promise to legalize trade unions.

What steps have the Guggenheim and the Louvre taken to insure that the new satellite museums bearing their names will not be built "on the backs of migrants working in highly exploitative conditions"?

Here's what Guggenheim spokesperson Betsy Ennis answered when I asked that question:

You should contact TDIC (Tourism Development & Investment Company) since it is an Abu Dhabi legal issue. I have heard, however, that they are revising the laws.

And then I asked:

Am I correct in understanding that the Guggenheim is leaving the details about construction-worker conditions up to TDIC, and that the Guggenheim will not be monitoring or assessing the worker situation independently?

Ennis' reply:

Our negotiations and agreements with Abu Dhabi are confidential and governed by strict confidentiality agreements.

This did little to relieve my Abu Dhabi anxiety, so I took Betsy's advice and contacted Bassem Terkawi, public relations manager of TDIC.

Terkawi's e-mailed response:

TDIC is committed to best practices in every aspect in which it operates and requires its partners to adhere to a code of best practices, including the treatment of overseas workers.

Two months ago, the UAE published a draft of a new labor law intended to address the human rights concerns.

Here's what HRW had to say about that on March 25:

The United Arab Emirates' proposed labor law falls far short of international standards for workers' rights, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The law should be revised to protect workers' rights to organize, bargain collectively and strike, and to cover excluded groups such as domestic workers.

The UAE's Labor Minister Ali Al Kaabi promptly derided this critique as "insane and illogical," according to a report in Middle East Times, quoting from the Al Khaleej daily.

If the museums are indifferent to these vexing human rights issues, perhaps the architects, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Tadao Ando and Zaha Hadid, should voice strong concern about how their plans will be realized on Saadiyat Island.

In Jeremy Kahn's excellent article in yesterday's NY Times, Is the U.S. Protecting Foreign Artifacts? Don't Ask, he provides a detailed analysis of the State Department's secretive Cultural Property Advisory Committee, which studies requests by foreign countries for U.S. import restrictions on cultural objects. No such request has ever been turned down by the State Department, but the most controversial one---by the People's Republic of China---has been pending for almost three years.

Kahn notes:

Dealers and collectors argue that the State Department's professional staff has manipulated the nominations process in recent years so that a majority of committee members at any given time lean toward broad import restrictions.

What he doesn't explain is why this might be so.

At least a part of what's driving this is probably the U.S. government's desire to score easy diplomatic points. As noted by art-law attorney William Pearlstein (in Who Owns the Past?, a compilation of essays on cultural-property issues):

U.S. enforcement agencies have no incentive to tolerate, much less promote, the importation of cultural property if the result would be to antagonize foreign governments that might, in consequence, withhold cooperation on matters...such as terrorism, drug smuggling, illegal immigration.

In other words, making concessions to foreign governments on matters of cultural patrimony is an easy way for the State Department to build diplomatic goodwill. The United State's cultural constituency---museums, collectors, dealers---isn't politically important enough to gain much visibility, let alone sympathy, at Foggy Bottom.

Kahn's article leads off with the controversy over the sweeping request from China that essentially would mean that every pre-1911 Chinese cultural object still in China would stay in China. (I've written more about this here.) What he doesn't tell us is that CPAC's recommendation on how to respond to this request is said to have already been been transmitted to the State Department. Not only the deliberations but also the recommendations of the committee are kept secret.

At a recent museum law conference that I attended in Philadelphia, Elaine Johnston, assistant general counsel for the Smithsonian Institution, stated that CPAC had now "made its recommendation [on China's request], which was never released." This matter is now awaiting final action by the Secretary of State, she said.

As Kahn noted in his article, the State Department "withholds...the recommendations that the committee makes," as well as "almost all material presented to the group to aid its deliberations." One wonders if the decision on Chinese cultural property may be affected by the reportedly imminent formal trade complaint (see UPDATE, below) by our country against China, over pirated movies, music and software. We may never know.

Kahn also reported that C. Miller Crouch, deputy assistant secretary of state, defended the secrecy enshrouding CPAC on the grounds that "the law that created the committee explicitly exempted it from public disclosure requirements that apply to similar federal advisory committees."

If so, that law runs counter to the spirit of open government and needs to be changed. There's no good rationale for making an exception that uniquely shields cultural property deliberations from Freedom of Information and Sunshine statutes. No national security interests will be harmed by disclosing what decision CPAC has made on China's request and how it has reached its conclusion.

If such transparency engenders controversy, so be it.

UPDATE: The U.S. today officially announced that it will "take China to court at the World Trade Organization over suspected trade barriers and piracy of books, music, videos and other goods," according to a report by Steven Weisman for tomorrow's NY Times. "All sides agree that the latest American actions portend a period of rough weather in United States-Chinese relations," Weisman notes. It remains to be seen what this may portend for the cultural patrimony contretemps.