Archives for January 2010

“Is Good Limited?”

“Murderme Ltd.”

“Overthesofa Ltd.”

Got any idea what those titles are? Try the names of companies in Damien Hirst’s business empire. I’m not always a fan of Hirst’s work, but I have to appreciate his sense of humor after reading an article in the January Art Newspaper by Martin Bailey.

Bailey went through British corporate records and found those among the names claimed by Hirst for his companies. There’s also “Underthesofa Ltd.,” “Resign Ltd.,” “The Goose Wot Laid the Golden Egg Ltd.” and “Victim Ltd.” His main company, Bailey says, is “Science Ltd.”

Explaining the sofa moniker, Hirst apparently told Interview magazine, “I’ve always thought at the end of the day art just goes over the f—ing sofa. You can’t take it too seriously.”

Bailey also cites the Sunday Times Rich List, which estimated Hirst’s wealth at GBP 235 — or $378 million.

Bailey’s article is not (yet?) posted online, but it’s at newsstands.  

A week has passed since the publication of my deaccessioning op-ed in The New York Times: the screams have occurred, the rebuttal letters have been printed, and it’s time again for me to weigh in on the objections. 

First, it seems I must repeat (because this has been ignored or misconstrued): I am not pro-deaccessioning to raise money for operations or endowments. I merely think that, on occasion, it will be considered, like it or not, and the museum world should have a process for that. I proposed arbitration to make it tough, not easy. I expect proving the need for deaccessions to be onerous in itself, and the hurdle to be set high by arbitrators. But it must be done in the open and in an orderly way, and often it isn’t now.

Here are the stated objections, with my responses:

1) Donors will not give art if they know it may some day sold. This is a canard: they already know (or should know) that their gifts may be sold to raise money for future acquisitions. Those who fear this put restrictions on their gifts.

2) It is “unreasonably paternalistic” to put museums through arbitration. The answer instead is to let museums sell any art they purchased, but not donated works. To me, this “solution” is worse than current practice, and really does turn museums into galleries, subject to the times, the fashions and the whims of each director.

3) The art that could be sold would never raise enough money to make a difference. Maybe yes, maybe no. Don’t forget that my proposal included all institutions with collections: a sum that means nothing to the Getty could well help bail out a historical society. But if it didn’t make a difference, the arbitrator — in my scheme — would not permit the sale.

    Furthermore, I doubt that deaccessioning would ever be the sole solution to financial woes — it would be part of a package of measures, including new donations.

4) We should rework “professional practices” to mandate that gifts of art include a cash payment to the museum’s operating endowment “equal to a set percentage of the tax-deductible value of the work.” Nice idea, in theory, but I believe it is unworkable and will truly discourage donations of art.

5) The decisions to be made by the arbitrator are “too central to the integrity of a museum to be given to others.” In other words, don’t tread on me. Fair enough — except that no one would invade the museum’s prerogatives if mismanagement by the director and trustees hadn’t gotten the museum in trouble in the first place. Maybe the director and the trustees should be replaced by people who can preserve institutional integrity without outside help.

      And by the way, museums/arts institutions currently seek outside approval for other things central to their integrity — they go to court or to an attorney general’s office for permission to invade their endowments, for example. And they try to do it quietly or even secretly.   

6) If deaccessioning is allowed, trustees will regularly leap to it, changing “the board’s perception of its fiduciary responsibility to one more focused on asset management than philanthropy.” Ah, yes — the slippery slope. Here I must question whether the right people are on boards, for the right reasons, and — equally important — the relationship between the director and trustees.

Numbers 5 and 6 are the true crux of the problem. I’ll return to them in a separate post.  

As the dust settles at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, it is interesting that few, if any, voices have been raised in support of Michael Brand (right), who stepped down as director of the Getty Museum this week. Contrast that with the aftermath of Deborah Gribbon’s 2004 resignation, when practically everyone placed the blame on Getty CEO Barry Munitz and her colleagues rallied to her support.

Of course, Munitz was unloved in the museum world, and not of it either — as Jim Wood (below), the current Getty CEO, is. Wood (who, btw, curiously took time during this tumultuous week to write a letter to the editor rebutting my deaccessioning op-ed, more about which soon), of course, was the longtime head of the Art Institute of Chicago. Wood retired from that job, but Chicagoans have always said, sotto voce, that he was eased out by powerful board chairman John H. Bryan.

But back to the Getty: according to my sources, neither Wood nor Brand liked one another, and Brand made no bones about that publicly. He told people. So, late last year, when Wood informed Brand that his contract would not be renewed upon its expiration at the end of this year, Brand worked out a better package and quit.  

Wood, it seems, may have been meddling a bit with Brand’s acquisitions aspirations, but not without expertise and support from trustees, who wanted better oversight. They also wanted Brand to cultivate donors who would contribute art, and Brand took the Getty job thinking he wouldn’t have to do much of that, one source told me.  

When I interviewed Wood in late November, 2008, for an article that ran last January in the Wall Street Journal, he told me that he wanted the Getty branches to be more collaborative and he instituted several Management 101 practices to get them to do that — like meeting once a week and writing better mission statements. At the time, he had not planned to make budget cuts, but he reversed himself very shortly after publication (yes, I checked with the PR department right before the article ran — no changes in the budget, I was told).

Aside from Brand, the other branch chiefs don’t seem to be chafing. Some Getty staffers say Wood has started to change the nasty, competitive, infighting culture that goes back to the days of Harold Williams. They are eager to dispel the notion that the Getty is structurally ungovernable, a notion that was repeated this week in several news reports.

Yet Munitz, for one, encouraged such thinking. A 2005 article in The New York Times, for example, contains this paragraph:

‘The fact is that they are one very important piece of what we do, but they are not the ultimate decision makers.’ Mr. Munitz said of the museum’s leaders, adding that the tensions were part of ”a philosophical, organizational issue that goes back 20 years.”

It doesn’t have to be that way, insiders say — the problem is cultural, not structural, they insist. Maybe, or maybe that’s wishful thinking.

In any case, Wood and the trustees now have a difficult recruiting job, not unlike the one faced by the Guggenheim Museum, when the director was supposed to report to Foundation CEO and former museum director Tom Krens. Trustees had to change that to win over Richard Armstrong. But I don’t see that happening in Brentwood.

 

As I’ve watched museums over the past several months as they curate shows from their own collections and sometimes from private collections nearby, I’ve had a sneaking suspicion that there’s a big downside to this as well as an upside.

The upside, of course, is that many visitors go to museums only — or mostly — to see the special exhibitions, leaving permanent collection galleries empty of visitors. Exhibits curated from permanent collections will expose those works to more people and perhaps entice visitors into permanent collection galleries on a regular basis.

The downside, which I confirmed this week, is that many exhibits are going without the preparation and publication of catalogues.

Consider an exhibit that the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, opened in December: Object, Image, Collector: African and Oceanic Art in Focus. According to the press release, the exhibit

traces the ascent of African and Oceanic objects from artifacts to works of art in the 20th century, drawing on 20 Boston-area collections and on the collections of the MFA. Besides presenting some 60 three-dimensional works and textiles of excellent quality, the exhibition also examines the role of photography and photographically illustrated books in promoting this shift in appreciation of pieces from Africa and Oceania.

But it has no catalogue — just a color brochure.

The Metropolitan has not published a catalogue for 5,000 Years of Japanese Art: Treasures From the Packard Collection and small, exhibitions built around a masterpiece or two, like The Milkmaid, aren’t getting catalogues either.

These are just a few examples. So I ask, are we losing scholarship here? Without catalogues, will those people who buy catalogues learn less? Will we lose permanent records of these exhibits?

We may well. Catalogues are expensive – $50,000, $60,000, and sometimes often (usually?) much, much more. (See comment, below.)

On the other hand, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is probably blazing a trail for its coming exhibit, Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris. There’ll be no “hardcopy” catalogues — but the museum responded to my query today by saying it will publish an online catalogue, “including all of the works in the museum’s permanent collection.” (More details as I get them.)

Auction houses and some galleries have been using very good technology for online catalogues for ages now, of course. For just one page-turning example, take a look at Jill Newhouse’s digital catalogue for Wolf Kahn’s Early Drawings.

UPDATED, 1/8: I asked Jill about the costs for the Wolf Kahn digital catalogue, which she put at about $3,500 plus a small monthly fee. She also referred me to her designer, Larry Sunden, who adds that all one has to do to use PageGangster, the site that published the Newhouse catalogue, is create a PDF and upload it. PageGangster does the rest for $200 and a monthly fee ($10 or so) to add the page-turning and other features and to store the catalogues on their server. Pretty simple. Newhouse is also doing one for her coming Master Drawings exhibit.  

And here’s a tale: Some scholarly publishers have learned that online publication actually led to an increase in demand for hardcovers. Once people had perused contents, they wanted their own copies.

Photos: Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts (top); Metropolitan Museum (bottom)

 

Sometimes the goings-on the the art world are absolutely mystifying — especially to outsiders. Here’s a little example, from the world of art fairs.

A press release popped into my emailbox the other day announcing that David and Lee Ann Lester, owners and organizers of several art and antique fairs, were launching a new marketing initiative to “bring targeted American designers and collectors to Olympia in June 2010.”

The Lesters’ organization, International Fine Art Expositions, will pick up the tab for 30 to 50 Americans to travel to the fair (and their hotels as well, as implied in the press release).

The Lesters took over co-management of this fair last summer, partly to raise its standing and profile, comparable — Mr. Lester boasted in an article in The Art Newspaper — to Maastricht. He’s rebranding it as the London International Fine Art Fair at Olympia; you can see the list of exhibitors (and costs of exhibiting, in the application) here.

But would you not think that people who are able to buy the arts on offer at a Maastricht-like fair would also be able to pay their own way there? Would they want to apply — compete even — for free travel? Or maybe the Lesters will simply extend invitations to the chosen ones. Either way, how would fair-goers feel if they weren’t chosen — like too small fish?

Yeah, I know Las Vegas operates, and maybe that’s the theory here — but somehow this doesn’t feel right at a time when so many arts groups, not to mention regular people, are struggling.

Note to self: lighten up! 

Photo: Courtesy London International Fine Art Fair