Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Museum Funding-Fundraising

Another Director’s Job Is Now Open

Jim-BallingerThe Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Barnes Foundation, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester — those museums all need directors. And now, so does the Phoenix Art Museum.

Last Thursday, on Apr. 17, Jim Ballinger — director there since 1982 — announced that he was retiring, with the effective date undisclosed but, I’d guess, probably related to the selection of his successor. The search will start immediately, the museum said.

Ballinger turns 65 this year, and started at the Phoenix museum as a curator there in 1974. According to the museum’s press release:

During Ballinger’s tenure, the museum has presented nearly 500 exhibitions and the collection has grown by 10,000 objects. Ballinger has personally organized more than 50 exhibitions, authored exhibition catalogues, a book on Frederic Remington, administered two major capital campaigns that expanded the museum from 72,000 square feet to its current 285,000 square feet and brought a number of blockbuster exhibitions to Phoenix, including the current Hollywood Costume. He currently manages a staff of more than 115 and an operating budget of $11.6 million a year. He is recognized as a leader nationally in the field of Western American art.

…”Today, the museum is four times the size physically and the budget is more than 10 times the size as when I started as director,” [Ballinger said].

That’s 40 years in one place, an anomaly in today’s world.

Details here.

AAMD Tries To Get Tough Re: Delaware Deaccession

Timothy Rub (pictured), current president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, has just penned a tough letter to Delaware officials — Governor Jack Markell, Attorney General Beau Biden and Wilmington Mayor Dennis P. Williams. It breaks no new ground, but it does make a decent point on the museum’s current strategy of non-disclosure:

timothy-rub…we are also deeply concerned that the Delaware Art Museum has refused to disclose publicly the works of art that it is considering selling. Given the importance of this decision and its potential impact, we believe that such information should be shared with the Museum’s members and the community as a whole so that they can understand what is at stake and be reassured that the action taken by the Board of Trustees does not violate donor intent or other strictures.

AAMD does intend, as it has said in the past, to impose sanctions on the Delaware Art Museum if it goes ahead with its plans to sell $30 million worth of art to pay its bills.

You can read the whole letter here.

But I have another non-disclosure quibble. Rub repeated what he has said before — the AAMD wants to help:

We also reaffirm our offer to help the Museum explore alternatives to this course of action.

Yet he has not, to my knowledge, even hinted at what alternatives he might be able to suggest than the museum hasn’t already explored on its own.

I realize that negotiating in the press is not a good strategy, so I’m not expecting details. But how about a few general hints? I for one would take the letter more seriously if he were more specific.

 

Detroit News Also Takes Stand Against Art Sale

Here’s that paper’s opinion piece: Offers to save DIA would mean big trade-offs for city, pensioners.

DIA-DNThe Detroit News  is less emotional about the riches in the Detroit Institute of Arts than its rival Free Press, but a column by Daniel Howes too argues against a sale and for the so-called grand bargain (foundations ponying up money to secure the DIA’s art from sale and remove it from city ownership). An excerpt:

The DIA is the central battleground in Detroit’s high-stakes bankruptcy and the prize is winning the support of pensioners who have the power to achieve one of two things, mainly: Take the richer DIA fund deal offered by Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr, or reject it, lose the additional funding and steel themselves for what is shaping up to be a bankruptcy cramdown of epic proportions….

[Judge] Rhodes, who has demonstrated an admirable ability to call BS from any and all sides when he sees it, doubtless will be obliged to consider the DIA alternatives filed Wednesday. He’ll see that the FGIC offer says the DIA fund isn’t what it purports to be. Details of the offers matter, but so does the fact that federal bankruptcy laws holds that only the city in a Chapter 9 case can decide to sell any, all or none of the DIA assets.

That’s why the DIA fund, raised mostly from Michigan-based donors, is so critical. The four potential alternatives offered by FGIC range from a low of $895 million from Yuan Management Hong Kong Limited for 116 works to a $2 billion loan from Art Capital Group LLC. It proposes to use the entire DIA collection as collateral for a loan to be serviced by the foundations and DIA donors.

How those proceeds would be used and to benefit which creditor class or classes is not clear — but it should be to pensioners who would be the sole beneficiaries of the DIA fund being offered by the foundations, state and DIA donors. That’s why the Big Money guys are so unhappy.

Good for him too.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Detroit News

 

 

Detroit Free Press Takes Strong Stance

“Buzzards”…”Hands off our stuff, you soulless, greedy, scavenging vultures”….”bald stupidity involved in selling off the DIA”…”The whole idea of municipal bankruptcy is to prevent this kind of shortsighted destruction”…”would destroy the state’s most important cultural asset”…”Chopping up the collection at the DIA would be a brutal and culturally ignorant extension of that very dynamic”…

DIA-galleriesThose are some of the strong words contained in an editorial in today’s Detroit Free Press, from a writer named Stephen Henderson, the Freep‘s editorial page editor and the host of American Black Journal. Good for him. I won’t quote the whole thing here, of course — I can’t — but there are choice bits worth reproducing.

Such as:

Take pieces that are part of a public collection and sell them into privacy for the super-rich. It drips with a galling elitism that says art is for the privileged, not people in cities like Detroit….

It’s even more insulting than the efforts made by creditors to pit protection of the art collection against the efforts to protect pensioners, which falsely sets up a zero sum game by which the city shouldn’t be able to manage both interests….

FGIC is way out of line, offering to hock Detroit’s cultural soul in a process that’s designed to protect citizens from that kind of fleecing….

And finally:

And the art? It ought to stay exactly where it is, in the museum that collected it for the people of this city.

Well said, all of it.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Detroit Free Press

Breaking News: Disgusting Developments In Detroit

Detroit’s creditors are getting out of hand. Today, news came that they have solicited bids for the art owned by the Detroit Institute of Arts — getting billion-dollar bids for the collection or key parts of it.

DIA-Wedding DanceAccording to both Detroit newspapers, the Financial Insurance Guaranty Co. (FGIC) has four tentative bids of up to $2 billion.

Said the Detroit Free Press:

The prospective investors include a coalition of Catalyst Acquisitions and Bell Capital Partners that tentatively offered $1.75 billion for all of the DIA’s property. The bids also include two Asian investors, including Beijing-based Poly International Auction, which tentatively offered up to $1 billion for the DIA’s Chinese art collection.

Said the Detroit News:

The bids, disclosed in a bankruptcy filing, ranged from $895 million to buy 116 unnamed artworks to a $2 billion loan that would require the entire 66,000-piece collection to be used as collateral.

Bond insurer Financial Guarantee Insurance Corp. filed an accompanying motion in U.S. Bankruptcy Court seeking to compel the city to let the bidders proceed with examining the paintings and sculptures and their accompanying ownership documentation.

Bankruptcy law gives a city’s creditors little leverage over the settlement, unlike corporate bankruptcies, thank goodness. We all just have to keep the judge informed how damaging this will be to the city of Detroit, long-term.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Detroit News