The CultureGrrl Curriculum: Help! I Need a Law Degree!

People who can't stand CultureGrrl and want to enjoy some schadenfreude should come see me get pummeled at a Columbia University Law School panel discussion in New York about museum deaccessioning. The scene of the bout, scheduled for Mar. 11 at 6 p.m., is the school's Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts, Jerome Greene Hall (corner of 116th Street and Amsterdam Avenue), Room 103.

I'm the only non-lawyer in what I believe (from the brief conference call we had) to be an otherwise deaccession-friendly group. If you don't know how I feel about museums' selling museum-quality works from their collections, this must be your first visit to CultureGrrl. Every panel needs a contrarian: I'm it.

The only thing that could possibly save me is that the panelists' bios (at the "panel discussion" link on top), seem to indicate that the lawyers, with one exception, haven't specialized in this particular type of case. That one exception should make the conversation interesting---C. Michael Norton, whose Nashville law firm has represented Fisk University in its attempt to get court approval to monetize its Stieglitz Collection. If you don't know how I feel about THAT situation, you definitely have not been paying attention.

Norton helpfully e-mailed me this Fisk-related article by Jack Siegel, whom I've previously cited as an authority on nonprofit governance here.

Titling the panel "Breaking Up is Hard to Do" was a big mistake, though. It might tempt me to do another singing podcast:

Don't send Bellows to Christie's maw,
Don't you send O'Keeffe to Arkansas,
Think what Albright-Knox went through,
And Eakins sales are hard to do.

No, I WON'T do this. Please stop me before I warble again!