AAMD’s Midwinter Meeting: Cultural Property, “Public Trust”

The Association of Art Museum Directors hasn’t released many substantive details about topics and possible actions being considered at its midwinter meeting, which began Saturday and ends tomorrow. While those of us in the Northeast are bracing for a blizzard, the directors, with a talent for being in the right place at the right time, are gathered in balmy Mexico City, where today’s official opening was preceded by two days of preliminary committee meetings and visits to museums and cultural sites, including the National Museum of Anthropology:

The association’s Cultural Property Committee met in closed session yesterday, but if the persuasive Timothy Rub couldn’t conspicuously move AAMD’s needle on this issue when he was the association’s president, I’m skeptical about future progress. (Still, individual museums have been increasingly proactive about analyzing the problematic pasts of certain antiquities and relinquishing some of them to countries of origin.)

In his indispensable Cultural Heritage Lawyer blog, attorney Rick St. Hilaire recently suggested that there may be “a new policy direction” at AAMD, in light of its recent opposition to the renewal of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) restricting imports of “endangered heritage objects from Nicaragua. The group’s objection follows a sequence of opposition to MOU’s begun in 2014,” St. Hilaire wrote.

Actually, AAMD’s skeptical approach to MOUs is not as new as St. Hilaire suggests: In 2011, AAMD issued a strongly worded statement asking the State Department’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee not to support an agreement with Greece unless that country agreed to several substantial changes in its own antiquities-related policies. Similarly, AAMD asked for significant changes in the scope of the MOU with China before its adoption in 2009 and again in 2013,when it was up for renewal. (Unfortunately, most of the links in my 2009 post on the China MOU have become non-functional.)

An AAMD discussion today on which I wish I could eavesdrop is the three-way “Conversation on the Public Trust,” which “will provide a larger philosophical, legal, and cultural framework for considering the idea of ‘public trust’ and its twin, ‘public good.'”

Somewhat counterintuitively, this colloquy features two participants who themselves have endured unfavorable public trust-related publicity—moderator Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum and chair of AAMD’s Professional Issues Committee, whose “Dakis Fracas,” in connection with the 2009 “Skin Fruit” exhibition, which I wrote about here and here; Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, to whom four megabucks donors had transferred funds and real estate, secretly supplementing his MoMA-budgeted compensation package.

Directors in glass houses might not be the best choices to throw words at the “larger philosophical, legal, and cultural framework” surrounding questions of public trust. (Is this a case of: “Don’t do as I did; do as I say”?) A better candidate for this panel might have been the guy in blue slacks at the center of the above photograph.

The other “public trust” pundit on the panel is Jacob Weisberg, a political journalist and chairman of the Slate Group (which publishes the eponymous online magazine). I’m not sure why AAMD regards Weisberg as an authority on museum governance: As far as I can determine, he’s written little on that subject, other than a 1998 Tom Krens-bashing piece.

Katie Luber, director of the San Antonio Museum of Art, yesterday tweeted a clue as to other topics in the air at Mexico City:

About to tackle committee work at #aamdmex-on the docket charitable deduction, ivory and provenance fellowships. @MuseumDirectors @SAMAart

— Katie Luber (@KatieSAMA) January 25, 2015

For more updates, you can follow the proceedings on Twitter: @MuseumDirectors and #aamdmex.