Bricks-and-Mortar Morass: Cleveland Desecrates Donor Intent

Cleveland Museum of Art's new Viñoly-designed East Wing

NOTE: A CultureGrrl reader informed me that the link I had posted (in the third paragraph below) to the Cleveland Museum's court filings had expired. These should work:
Cleveland Filing 1.PDF
Cleveland Filing 2.PDF
Cleveland Filing 3.PDF
Cleveland Filing 4.PDF

The Cleveland Museum last week filed for court permission (as first reported here by the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Steve Litt) to deviate from the terms of charitable funds established by four major supporters. The benefactors had stipulated that their gifts be applied to the acquisition of art, not bricks and mortar.

Cleveland's legal quest to divert income from those funds to its capital campaign is, to my mind, the most egregious disregard of donor intent by an art-displaying institution in recent memory.

In its court filings, the museum did not argue (as did the Barnes Foundation, Fisk University and the National Academy) that it needed relaxation of ethical guidelines or donor restrictions because its very survival was at stake. It wants to use the money to help fund the second phase of its 200,000-square-foot Rafael Viñoly-designed expansion. The projected cost of the museum's ambitious capital project (which included construction of its East Wing, above, which opened in June) ballooned from $258 million in 2005 to $350 million as of mid-2008---just before the economic bubble burst. The museum has already demolished its 1958 and 1983 wings---the first part of the project's second phase.

This episode is all the more lamentable because, unlike other art-exhibiting institutions that have toyed with donor intent, Cleveland is a premier art museum and belongs to the Association of Art Museum Directors, whose members purport to uphold and promote the highest ethical standards of responsible governance.

I will discuss the museum's legal arguments in a subsequent post. But first, what does AAMD think?

Litt reports:

[Timothy] Rub [the museum's director], who will leave next month to take over the Philadelphia Museum of Art, said that using art-purchase income for construction would not violate ethical guidelines of the Association of Art Museum Directors, the lead organization of the nation's largest art museums.