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| CHICAGO, Feb. 14 — It’s not easy for museum directors these days. Their world is filled with ironies. They must stay on top of the relentlessly expanding universe of contemporary art; yet if they present puzzling or disturbing work by young artists, they are accused of betraying their public missions. They are pressured to reach out to young, poor and ethnically diverse audiences; but when they mount “popular” exhibitions, they are scolded for “dumbing-down.” | |||
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If museums hope to replenish their collections, they must stack their boards with wealthy collectors.
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THE INFLUENCE of wealthy collectors on museums — on their policies, their programming, and their acquisitions — is widely deplored; nevertheless, if museums hope to replenish their collections, they must stack their boards with exactly those people. The price of art, meanwhile, is rising fast, and government support is a pipe dream; still, museums are expected to somehow remain pure, faithful to their academic mission and untainted by shrill business practices. This state of affairs results in much-publicized flash points, like the controversy that surrounded “Sensation,” the exhibition of British artists from the Saatchi Collection in London that closed last month at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. As is widely known, the BMA and its director, Arnold L. Lehman, endured a public hazing after New York’s Mayor Rudolph Giuliani threatened to withdraw funding and evict the museum from its landmark building — all for exhibiting Chris Ofili’s allegedly offensive “The Holy Virgin Mary.” |
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| The Brooklyn Museum of Art and its director, Arnold L. Lehman, endured a public hazing for exhibiting Chris Ofili's allegedly offensive "The Holy Virgin Mary," a collage of paper, paint, polyester resin and elephant dung on linen. | 
The Brooklyn Museum deflected the challenge on First Amendment grounds. But documents subpoenaed during the court proceedings revealed juicy details about the pragmatic underpinnings of such large museum shows. People outside the art world, including some of the journalists who reported on the controversy, were nonplussed by reports of Charles Saatchi’s $160,000 donation to mount the show. Eyebrows were raised by news of checks written by collectors and dealers with a commercial stake in some Saatchi artists; by the sponsorship of Christie’s auction house, and the privileges extended in return; and by the alleged quid pro quo with David Bowie, the rock star and art patron, who gave money to the show and recorded an audio tour, in return for featuring “Sensation” on his Web site. Such deals, it turns out, are fairly common in the museum world. But the recent revelations about them have spurred a surge of interest in the ethics and politics of museum management. ‘SENSATION’ POSTMORTEM |
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Museums are no longer seen as the ‘authoritative cultural arbiter’ they once were.
— KIMERLY RORSCHACH director, the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art |
The apotheosis of the “Sensation” postmortems was reached Saturday, when the University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Program convened almost 400 academics and arts professionals at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago for a meeting titled “Taking Funds, Giving Offense, Making Money: The Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy and the Dilemmas of Art Policy.” It did not go unnoticed that the meeting took place at a distance from New York and at a moment when, it seemed, everything that could be said about “Sensation” had already been said. But smart people at a safe remove from the battlefield can add new, significant brushstrokes to what is by now a familiar picture. Several speakers zeroed in on the issue of trust. Kimerly Rorschach, director of the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, pointed out that museums are no longer seen as the “authoritative cultural arbiter” they once were. This questioning of authority is connected to the end of the Cold War and the ideological and artistic pluralism that has followed in its wake. For museums, the past two decades have been particularly difficult. “Acquisition has become a mine field of difficulties,” Rorschach said, given the conflicts surrounding the international trade in art and the still unresolved tensions arising from restitution claims following World War II. Museums have also had to accommodate themselves to a multicultural society, where fewer people feel the need to adapt to “the European model of culture.” And, of course, museums are also becoming ever more costly to run. This complex “new reality” sets the stage for the kind of efforts aimed at attracting larger audiences and new funding sources that were epitomized by the “Sensation” scandal, Rorschach argued. DRAWING THE LINE But in their search for new audiences and revenues, where should museums draw the line? Answers to that question turned out to be the conference’s bombshells. |
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| A shopping bag from the "Sensation" show, designed for publicity, became notorious. It read: "The contents of this exhibition may cause shock, vomiting, confusion, panic, euphoria and anxiety..." | 
The biggest of them was dropped by Gilbert Edelson, administrative vice president and counsel to the Art Dealers Association of America. Edelson asked three questions: Should museums show works from private collections? Should they exhibit works that will be sold? And should they feature works connected to individuals who have a financial stake in the art? The answer, he said, was a “qualified yes” on all three fronts. “As long as the museum retains its curatorial independence” there is no theoretical limit to what kinds of activities it can undertake. In fact, museums already do things that some observers find ethically questionable. Specifically, Edelson noted, some museums sell art works in addition to staging exhibitions. He cited a museum show of contemporary art from which works were sold to a private collector. The museum received a dealer’s commission. This claim stunned some of the fellow panelists. James Cuno, Director of the Harvard University Art Museums, labeled the practice inappropriate. But according to several accounts, it is not so uncommon. A fellow conference speaker mentioned a defunct program at The Philadelphia Museum of Art that had conducted art sales and rentals. Moreover, we’re all familiar with the fundraising auctions that non-profit institutions undertake to boost endowments and support exhibitions. Museums are known to commission limited series of furnishings, clocks, coffee sets and other decorative items from the same practicing artists whose art works they exhibit in their galleries. And what precisely is the ethical line between selling reproductions of paintings and selling original etchings by the same artist? |
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| Thelma Golden, of the Studio Museum of Harlem, pointed out that adventurous curators "are often placed in the role of having to be more creative, more entrepreneurial ... to fund a project and bring it to the public." | 
Thelma Golden, deputy director for exhibitions and programs at The Studio Museum of Harlem in New York threw more more light on the dilemmas she and her curator colleagues face in today’s art world, especially if they want to exhibit challenging new works of art. “In doing exhibitions of new work that can be perceived as difficult, controversial or political,” she said, “curators and their institutions are often placed in the role of having to be more creative, more entrepreneurial, in order to fund a given project and bring it to the public.” This makes life difficult for curators because you have to “figure things out, not just financially but also ethically,” she added. “You are moving into new territory in terms of the way a curator might work with an artist in order to make an exhibition happen.” |
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Small museums, often the sole arts institutions in their cities, ‘regularly exhibit and sell works by artists in their community. They see this as part of fulfilling their service to the community.’
— GILBERT EDELSON vice president, Art Dealers Association of America |
As with all fuzzy ethical quandaries, a lot depends on context. Smaller regional museums, which are often the sole arts organizations in their cities, “regularly exhibit and sell works by artists in their community,” the Art Dealers Association’s Edelson explained. “They see this as part of fulfilling their service to the community.” Virtually all museums are involved in commercial ventures of various kinds and sell a host of products in their gift shops. They have “moved away from the idea that they are temples of art,” he continued on a polemical note. “Why not go all out and be an art dealer?” In the end, these issues appear to boil down not to what museums do, but how they do it and with whom. Several speakers suggested that there is a difference between entering into a sponsorship agreement with Charles Saatchi (a controversial figure in the art world who moves adeptly between the roles of patron, dealer, and public relations impresario) and accepting funds from a figure such as Paul Mellon (the famously private and incorruptible one-time patron of the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.). NO CLEAR-CUT PRESCRIPTIONS “The appearance of propriety is crucial,” said Harvard’s James Cuno. “It is a branding issue. When one says ‘Valdez’, one thinks Exxon. When one thinks ‘Sensation’, one thinks Brooklyn.” Clearly, museum directors have to walk a fine line. There are no clear-cut ethical prescriptions. Beyond worrying about what’s theoretically permissible, Teri Edelstein, a museum consultant and lecturer in art history at the University of Chicago, suggested, it would be good for museums to make sure that they have formulas ready to handle unanticipated controversies like the one in Brooklyn: “They have a plan for a power outage or other catastrophic event, but little or nothing about the eventuality of a public outcry.” Some of the more concise — and most sobering — big-picture assessments of the fallout from “Sensation” emerged from a panel of legal and public policy experts. David Strauss, a professor of law and editor of the “Supreme Court Review,” warned about the “false promise of the First Amendment” as a means for defending museums when they are challenged by government authorities. The strategy worked in Brooklyn, he said, but the art community shouldn’t rely on free speech as its main line of defense. |
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| David Strauss, a professor of law and editor of the Supreme Court Review, warned about the "false promise of the First Amendment." | 
According to Strauss, such rulings send a message to government administrators: “Be careful about getting into this business [of funding art], because once you’re in it, you might not be able to get out.” First Amendment protection encourages government to fund “careful” art, and institutions that provide a reasonable assurance “that they will not do things that are objectionable.” And government can take the First Amendment out of the picture completely, by pulling out of direct arts funding and relying instead on other means, such as tax breaks, to support the work of art institutions.‘HYBRID’ INSTITUTIONS Mark Schuster, a professor of urban cultural policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also ridiculed the conventional thinking. The world is no longer divided into two parts — public and private institutions — he said. The trend is toward “hybrid” institutions, which present a “tricky and increasingly complicated problem” for policymakers, since it is unclear to whom and what purpose they are accountable. |
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| Mark Schuster, professor of urban cultural policy at M.I.T., told the conference: "We can't pretend on Monday that this [museum] is a public institution, and on Tuesday that it is a private institution." | 
“We can’t pretend on Monday that this [museum] is a public institution, and on Tuesday that it is a private institution,” Schuster said. The new funding models that are emerging both in the United States and abroad render many of the terms and issues in this debate moot. “It’s hard to know how we move from individual controversies to the design of systems,” he concluded.The last word on the “Sensation” controversy was David Halle’s, during a massive panel that had two dozen speakers and was moderated by Chicago broadcaster John Callaway. Halle, who runs the LeRoy Neiman Center for the Study of American Society and Culture at UCLA, conducted an exit poll of 850 people after they toured the Brooklyn Museum exhibition. Contrary to Mayor Giuliani’s fears, 80 percent of those polled took no offense at the works on view. Halle’s conclusion? “The people who are offended by this stuff don’t go to see it,” he said, “and those who see it are not offended by it.” Andras Szanto, associate director of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University, is a sociologist of arts and culture. | |||
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  Seeing paintings
in a brighter light Art and tech: an intimate, early mix Taking on the Vienna Philharmonic Satisfying a hunger for deep thoughts |
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