BlogBack: Elyse Topalian of the Met on the Brooklyn Costume Deaccessioning
Elyse Topalian, the Metropolitan Museum's vice president for communications, responds to Brooklyn's Costume "Transfer" to the Met: A Huge Deaccession-in-Disguise:
The above-linked announcement of the speakers and planned topics for the symposium, which took place less than six months ago, made no mention of planned sales---only the "historic collection-sharing collaboration" and the "innovative arrangement" between the Met and the Brooklyn Museum. I gather (from Elyse's comments) that the actual discussion did get into disposal details.
Clearly these plans weren't to remain secret forever: The items are being offered openly at public auction. What was missing, though, was complete candor and transparency from the beginning.
No one troubled to send me a corrective note in December 2008, when I wrongly inferred from the press release that the Brooklyn/Met deal was a straight transfer that involved no sales.
I regret the error.
The Metropolitan Museum and the Brooklyn Museum have openly discussed, with both press and the public, the decision to sell certain pieces that would not come to the Met because they duplicated items already in the Met's collection or did not meet our collecting criteria, and it was made clear that any proceeds would go to the Brooklyn Museum's acquisitions fund.NOTE FROM CULTUREGRRL: I would only observe that the original announcement of the costume transfer---which mentioned only collection-sharing, not collection-selling----predated the NY Post article by 10 months. (I linked to the Post article, to my knowledge the earliest published mention of disposals, in my CultureGrrl post yesterday.)
We refer you to Eve Kahn's New York Times column [scroll down] from Oct. 30, 2009, and a New York Post article dated Oct. 4, 2009, as well as a symposium [my links, not hers] held last summer at both the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum. The symposium, in particular, included description and discussion of the decision-making process.
The decisions about which items would be sold were made following a major Mellon Grant assessment that predated the agreement between the two institutions, as well as a complete item-by-item assessment by the Met's Costume Institute that was conducted after the agreement went into effect.
The above-linked announcement of the speakers and planned topics for the symposium, which took place less than six months ago, made no mention of planned sales---only the "historic collection-sharing collaboration" and the "innovative arrangement" between the Met and the Brooklyn Museum. I gather (from Elyse's comments) that the actual discussion did get into disposal details.
Clearly these plans weren't to remain secret forever: The items are being offered openly at public auction. What was missing, though, was complete candor and transparency from the beginning.
No one troubled to send me a corrective note in December 2008, when I wrongly inferred from the press release that the Brooklyn/Met deal was a straight transfer that involved no sales.
I regret the error.
November 17, 2010 7:06 PM
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LEE ROSENBAUM I'm a veteran cultural journalist with many pieces in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and major art magazines. I have been a cultural contributor on New York Public Radio (WNYC and WQXR) and have provided arts commentary on NPR and public radio stations in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. I am a HuffPost Arts writer. I've been profiled on the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer's Art Beat and in the Chicago Reader. I've appeared as an art-market commentator on BBC-TV and have published numerous Op-Ed pieces in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. I am author of The Complete Guide to Collecting Art (Knopf) and have lectured on cultural property issues at the New Acropolis Museum and the University of Pennsylvania, on deaccessioning at at Investigative Reporters and Editors 2011 Annual Meeting, Columbia Law School, the University of Iowa and a conference of the Museum Association of New York, on museum governance and cultural property issues at Seton Hall University, on arts blogging at American University and on Smithsonian exhibition controversies at Rutgers University.
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Photo © by Jill Krementz
CULTUREGRRL SPEAKS on museum issues and ethics, arts journalism.
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________________________
moreLEE ROSENBAUM I'm a veteran cultural journalist with many pieces in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and major art magazines. I have been a cultural contributor on New York Public Radio (WNYC and WQXR) and have provided arts commentary on NPR and public radio stations in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. I am a HuffPost Arts writer. I've been profiled on the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer's Art Beat and in the Chicago Reader. I've appeared as an art-market commentator on BBC-TV and have published numerous Op-Ed pieces in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. I am author of The Complete Guide to Collecting Art (Knopf) and have lectured on cultural property issues at the New Acropolis Museum and the University of Pennsylvania, on deaccessioning at at Investigative Reporters and Editors 2011 Annual Meeting, Columbia Law School, the University of Iowa and a conference of the Museum Association of New York, on museum governance and cultural property issues at Seton Hall University, on arts blogging at American University and on Smithsonian exhibition controversies at Rutgers University.
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Write to me here.
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