DATELINE: May 3, 2009, Chicago
Yesterday we attended Artropolis, the annual international art show, now held at Chicago’s Merchandise Mart. As in past years, we came to see the art, but this year we were intrigued by one of the panel discussions. Entitled Museums on the Line: Cutbacks, Closures and Opportunities, the panel included (i) Michael Rush, director of the Rose Museum of Art at Brandeis University; (ii) Anthony Hirschel, director of the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago; (iii) Mary Lucier, an American installation and video artist whose works have been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995), the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (1988), Whitney Museum (1986), and many others. Heather Pesanti, a curator at the Buffalo’s Albert-Knox Art Gallery, was an unscheduled but welcome addition to the panel.
The discussion was both fascinating and enlightening, but the panel’s composition was...
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too singular. These individuals can take comfort from each other’s support and admiration, but the art world faces some serious economic issues. The discussion would have shed much more light had a finance person or trustee responsible for raising money been included.
The springboard for the lively discussion (which included an engaged audience) was the January 26, 2009 decision by the Brandies board of trustees to close the Rose Museum and sell its collection of more 6,000 works of contemporary art for a hoped-for $350 million payoff. As Rush recounted in great detail, Brandeis has been roundly criticized for this decision, receiving over 5,000 communications from around the world, including communications from Australia, India, and Malaysia.
While Rush makes an excellent case why Brandeis should not close the museum or sell the artwork, Pisanti’s presence on the panel largely undercut the case—although she was nothing less than supportive of Rush. Pisanti works for a museum that lacked adequate funding to acquire new works of art. To avoid becoming a mausoleum (Pisanti’s term), the Albright-Knox Art Gallery was forced to sell several works in 2007 (including Artemis and the Stag), resulting in controversy and litigation as those who loved those works tried to stop the sales. The deaccessioned works were not central to the Albright-Knox’s focus on modern and contemporary work. Of all the panelists, Pisanti exhibited the most business acumen. We suspect that Lucier also is pretty savvy when it comes to the business of art.
The juxtaposition of the Rose and the Albright-Knox is problematic. The Albright-Knox is a freestanding art museum. Its mission is to display, collect, study, and preserve art. Brandeis, on the other hand, is a college. Its purpose is to educate students in diverse areas of study. We don’t have any idea what the actual percentage is, but we suspect most students who opt for Brandeis don’t do so because of the Rose. This museum might be a pleasant surprise to many of Brandeis’s freshman, but it is most likely an unexpected one to all but a few. Rush’s main and recent focus has centered on the Rose, but Brandeis’s administration and trustees clearly must oversee and manage a much larger institution. Consequently, the decision currently facing Brandeis is entirely different from the one faced by the Albright-Knox.
That should not be taken to mean that the Brandeis trustees are not without fault. As we have noted before, their decision was hasty. It ignored important legal issues. Most importantly, the trustees failed to seek input from significant stakeholders as they deliberated in secret. Tomorrow we will take up the interim report issued last week by a committee Brandeis assembled to further consider the Rose’s fate. The report may be one of the worst written we have ever read both in terms of style and substance. Brandeis should be embarrassed if this report is characteristic of the best work that its faculty produces.
But as has been well documented, Brandeis faces a financial crisis, due in part to significant losses in the value of its endowment. Although we can only speculate, we strongly suspect that the Bernard Madoff scandal may be a factor in the decision. The media has reported that a number of likely Brandeis donors were hard hit by the Madoff scandal. The administration may be responding to the likelihood that expected legacies will not materialize.
We can’t help but note that there was some hypocrisy exhibited during the discussion. Mark White, who was in the lively audience, proposed that museums think of creative ways to monetize the value of their collections. He is working on an idea rooted in the property-law notion that a piece of property is a bundle of sticks, with each stick representing a different right or attribute. Under one of his proposals, a museum would retain all but one of the rights associated with a work in its collection. It would sell the right to others to display the work in their homes when the museum is not displaying it or conserving it or a scholar/historian is not studying it. As various panelists and audience members pointed out, there are some problems with this idea. For example, how does the museum assure that the buyer will care for the art and not display it in direct sunlight? Equally important, there is more to a museum’s mission than just displaying work. The art must be available to scholars who want to study it.
But there was a disturbing undercurrent in these specific concerns. The notion that a work of art could be divided into fractional interests was characterized as too dangerous, a slippery slope, and troubling. We understand the specific concerns, but museums have had not been troubled by the notion of fractional interests in works of art when it comes to devising tax schemes that entice donations of fractional interests in works to museums. The fractional interest structure has permitted museums to lockup donor commitments before minds can change. As the legislative history to the Pension Protection Act of 2006 points out, there were abuses of fractional gifts, abuses that involved collusion between donors and museums. Under the practices that evolved, donors retained possession of the art. The museums didn’t seem all that concerned about sunlight or broken water pipes in those instances.
One audience member came to White’s defense, arguing that museums need to pursue creative solutions to their financial problems. Although White’s idea may need some tweaking and may not even be viable, he is at least thinking creatively about how to finance aesthetic sensibilities. In essence, the audience member argued that the curators should show the same open-mindedness to finance that they demand of the public when it comes to art.
The other thread of hypocrisy came to light when two of the panelists drew a sharp distinction between types of endowment. While lawyers think of endowment as a monolith, the curators divided endowment between acquisition endowment and operating endowment. In keeping with museum ethics and museum association membership requirements, the curators view the sale of artwork as appropriate to fund acquisition endowment, but not operating endowment. Except to the extent that donor-imposed legal restrictions draw this distinction, it creates a false and unrealistic dichotomy. Building and working with a collection is wonderful, but collections have to be housed, protected, and displayed to the public. That brings us to what is too often viewed as the seedy side of the mission, operations and funding. Museums must attract the public if funds are to keep flowing. That means bookstores, restaurants, and receptions. It means staging exhibits that draw people and donors.
Rush recalled attending performances during the 1970s in New York City where only four people showed up. That’s great and we have attended similar events, but that badge of honor doesn’t put food on the table or keep museums or colleges and universities open. Rush is naïve to think that trustees and management can divide the world as curators apparently do. Those who oversee and mange museums have a fiduciary duty to allocate what are too often scarce institutional resources.
In Rush’s defense, the Rose appears to be been well run, at least by his accounts. With the exception of the essentials like heat and light (if we heard Rose correctly), the Rose is self-sustaining. In fact, in an exchange between Rush and one Rose benefactor who was present, it was made clear that Rush’s own salary was paid for by Rose benefactors. That fact supports Rush’s claim that the university and its trustees acted hastily and short-sightedly. Rose’s continued presence through a renewal of his contract would not cost Brandeis a dime, but it would provide the university with someone who would protect the collection while the university made its decisions. But looking at the world from the viewpoint of Brandeis's current administration and its not so hidden agenda, getting rid of Rush does make some sense. He has become an outspoken critic of the decision.
Several audience members who were sympathetic to the panel’s viewpoint spoke about the importance of art to them and our culture. We were struck by a comment from one gentleman who pointed out that he and many others remember the artists, musicians, and authors from centuries gone by rather than the business people. Two audience members referred to art as the icing on the cake, with one suggesting that it was the cake. Rush viewed the Rose collection as tied closely to the Holocaust because the generation of donors who assembled it did so in the wake of World War II. For that reason, Rush is deeply troubled by the Rose’s possible extinction. Lucier, the international artist, recalled how the Rose was her home when she arrived at Brandies as a student in 1961.
These are all great sentiments, but until those who believe in art regardless of costs begin to deal with the economics of displaying art, maintaining collections, and operating a museum, they are destined to be ruled by the accountants and trustees that make them so nervous and uncomfortable. As we have pointed out time and time again, those on boards who leave seemingly incomprehensible financial issues to the experts pay a price. Financial issues are anything but objective and numbers driven. Unless people are willing to confront these issues, they will lose the policy debate to those who use the subterfuge of finances to disguise their preferred policy positions. Curators and museum directors assume the same risk when they fail to fully engage the numbers and the law.
Rush did acknowledge the importance of finance when he noted that museums and other cultural institutions have taken great strides in quantifying the value to communities in terms of increased tax revenue and employment. Until people like Rush are willing to delve even deeper than they would like into finances, accounting, and operations, the problems that the Rose and other museums now face will only grow worse.
What must frustrate Rush to no end is the Rose's position in a two-tiered corporate structure. The Rose may be financially sound, but whether Rush likes it or not, the Rose is part of a larger institution over which Rush has no control. We agree with Rush that the trustees acted hastily and didn’t sufficiently explore alternatives. Yet, if there were an objective and thorough examination of the alternatives, the right decision for Brandeis might still be to maximize the value of the collection by selling it—assuming the Massachusetts Attorney General and donor-imposed restrictions permit its sale. We suspect that Rush can’t accept that fact.
This was a worthwhile panel, but as we said at the outset, the panel was not balanced. This was quite apparent when several panel members made comments about tax and nonprofit law and accounting principles that were flat out wrong. We couldn’t help but note one statement in particular: By being a museum and accepting charitable contributions, the museum becomes a public entity, or so one of the participants asserted We strongly disagree with this statement. Nonprofits exist as private associations of individuals. The government has no legal ownership interest in them. If any of the panelists disagree, they should take a look at the 1st Amendment, which has been construed to guarantee the right of association.
This observation should not be viewed as a snitty barb directed at the panelists. Sitting in an audience in Chicago, we couldn’t help but think of the fate of the Terra Museum. Despite the fact that its articles of incorporation said nothing about it activities being limited to the benefit of people of Illinois, government officials argued that somehow the citizens of Illinois had legal claims on the collection. This argument always intrigued us given the fact that Terra operated a museum in France.
Time will tell, but Brandeis may end up losing a valuable asset if the Massachusetts Attorney takes a position similar to the one taken in Chicago. Everybody who is interested in preserving the Rose should avoid such dangerous language. Rush may hope that the attorney general prevents the sale of the Rose collection, but he should be as concerned as Brandeis if the attorney general claims an ownership interest and decides to redeploy the assets to serve political ends.
As a final thought, we encourage Artropolis to expand the panel series at next year's event. We attended one other session and would have attended more had we known earlier about the panels. We thoroughly enjoyed the entire experience.
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