According to pals at The New York Times, J. Ezra Merkin, the financier who lost billions of his investors’ money in the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, has agreed to sell his famed collection of Mark Rothkos (plus some Giacomettis)  for $310 million. The deal is expected to lead to a settlement of charges made by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. Here are the critical paragraphs in a breaking story:

According to people briefed on the matter, Mr. Merkin was paying as much as $60,000 a month for insurance and had $61.3 million left in loans originally taken out to buy the artwork, which was sold to an anonymous buyer.

The deal comes after weeks of negotiations between Mr. Merkin and Mr. Cuomo’s office over how the proceeds of the sale would be handled. The two sides eventually agreed to put about $191 million in an escrow that could eventually be used to repay investors. Justice Richard Lowe of the New York State Supreme Court is expected to approve the art deal.

And this:

“This will preserve assets that, if our litigation is successful, will provide restitution to victims of Mr. Merkin’s alleged fraud,” Mr. Cuomo’s office said in a statement.

Here’s the press release from Cuomo’s office.

In January, Ben Heller, 83, the art advisor who helped Merkin put together the collection, told Bloomberg News that “I am flooded with phone calls” from people who wanted to buy them.

Who could shell out $310 million in this climate? No one who knows talking. I did hear one person, however, conjecture that Pace Wildenstein, which sold some of the Rothkos to Merkin, may be the “buyer,” but one that has already lined up collectors to sell some works to.  

Here’s the link to the NYTimes DealBook blog item.

Update: Bloomberg has now posted a story on the settlement, here.

Here’s one contemporary art collector who’s trying to help out artists: Glenn Fuhrman, the co-managing partner of MSD Capital LP, which manages money for Michael Dell, is giving artists whose galleries have closed a show this summer.

My friend Lindsay Pollock wrote a story about it for Bloomberg (here). 

Here are the key paragraphs:

Titled “Re-Accession: For Sale by Owner,” — a combination of “recession” and “de-accession” — the summer- long show opened June 23 at Fuhrman’s Flag Art Foundation, located on the 9th and 10th floors of a glassy commercial condominium building called the Chelsea Arts Tower, featuring million-dollar views of the Hudson River and Manhattan’s industrial West Side.

The show features 31 artists, among them those formerly associated with galleries including Roebling Hall, Merge and Moeller Snow — spaces that are now defunct. Some artists had been dropped or otherwise lost gallery representation as dealers have trimmed rosters. Others had ridden out the art boom without ever landing a dealer.

Lindsay reports that everything is for sale, but that Fuhrman is not involved in the sales or taking a commission.

Good idea, I think. 

The National Archives has been in the news in recent days for releasing another raft of Nixon materials — some 30,000 pages of documents and 154 hours of tapes were opened to the public
on June 23. But they’ve been well-covered in the national press, and I’m not writing about them here.

Rather, as the National Archives celebrates its 75th Anniversary — and the picture here illustrates the condition of some War Department records, held during the 1930s in a White House garage, before their creation — I simply want to call your attention to a 21st Century development there. On June 19, the Archives formally launched its own YouTube channel. On it, the Archives plans to showcase some popular archived films, including those on the space race, World War II, America in the 1930s, and clips of “favorite things” in Presidential libraries.

Here’s the YouTube link.

If you are at all into American history, the NA website itself is full of things to see — documents, photos, records of all sorts.

It’s hard to tell how many museums and performing arts groups have YouTube channels. The Indianapolis Museum of Art does, as do the Metropolitan Museum (link) and the Columbus Museum of Art (link). There must be others. But when I made random checks, I found plenty of others, including the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, the Dallas Performing Arts Center, without them (some had posted clips, however).

If the National Archives and the Library of Congress, which also has its own YouTube channel, have moved in this direction, can arts organizations afford not to? Just asking.

UPDATE, 6/30, 11:30: The Indianapolis Museum of Art reminds me that it launched ArtBabble.org in April, as a destination for videos about art, with Art21, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the New York Public Library as partners. A wonderful development, and nothing to ignore. Moreover, IMA says, it will be naming more partners later this year. I was focusing on YouTube, however, because of its mass appeal. Maybe arts groups, like IMA itself, need both channels.

Photo Credit: National Archives

At the Brooklyn Museum* on Friday, I stopped in to see the just-opened Yinka Shonibare MBE exhibition, which runs through Sept. 20. Unbeknownst to me, it beautifully illustrates one of the
strategies I was going to bring up at my lunch with Director Arnold Lehman for getting people interested in seeing museums’ permanent collections. Lehman and the museum’s curators were one step ahead of me: they had already displayed some of Shonibare’s works within the permanent collection galleries.

Most of the Shonibare show is on view in the fourth-floor special exhibitions galleries, with a couple pieces on the first floor, too. But Brooklyn also asked him to make site-specific works that are on display — surprise — in its period rooms.

Retailers have used this strategy for years — setting up boutiques for, say, Coach leather goods in a department store. When shoppers go in to buy a Coach bag, they stay to shop for other merchandise. (Well, they did.)

What Brooklyn did isn’t unique in the museum world, but it’s not common, either; other museums can take a lesson from its example. The execution in the Shonibare show is brilliant.

Brooklyn has wonderful period rooms, ranging from the Milligan House Parlor (above) to a Rockefeller House Moorish Room, yet I’d venture that they get little traffic compared with the rest of the museum. For this installation — called Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play — Shonibare made seven figures of children, headless as usual and dressed in Victorian costumes of the same Dutch wax fabrics he uses in the rest of his show. 

[Read more…] about Can Yinka Shonibare Draw Visitors to Brooklyn’s Period Rooms?

You don’t often get to write in newspapers or magazines about works of art that have been in collections for decades — after all, what’s the news value?

That’s one reason I love the Saturday column in The Wall Street Journal called “Masterpiece: Anatomy of a Classic.” Every week someone describes and details what makes a work worthy of the distinction. Today, I had one about the Alexander sarcophagus in Instanbul’s archeological museum; here’s the link. (There’s one error: the WSJ picture is mis-captioned: that’s a side panel, showing the Battle of Gazza, not Alexander at the battle of Issus — illustrated in the picture here.) 

I’ve written a handful of these pieces, and they’re a joy. My favorite is “Staring Durer in the Face,” about his 1500 self-portrait as Christ. (If that’s behind the pay wall, it’s also posted on my website here.)

These pieces are not just about visual art. Nicely, the WSJ takes a broader view. In recent weeks, the column has examined Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago, Eric Ambler’s “A Coffin For Dimitrios,”  and the Eiffel Tower. There’ve been films, buildings, and musical works, too.

It’s always worth a look, even if you don’t agree with the choices.