Another museum puts its collection on the block

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
April 15, 2009

Another Museum Puts Its Collection on the Block
by James Panero

Another day, another deaccession. On March 23, after a "strategic review of its operations and capitalizations," the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, N.J., announced a new "financial security plan." In what has become an all-too-common practice in the art world, this plan will include the sale, or "deaccession," of 50 works from the museum's permanent collection, among them a Jackson Pollock drawing valued at $300,000 to $500,000 and several Hudson River School and American Impressionist works with estimates ranging from $25,000 to $300,000, according to a prospectus prepared by Christie's. The auction house believes the sales will generate between $2.9 million and $4.3 million for the institution, which says it will use the funds for future acquisitions. Presented as curatorial housekeeping, but in fact motivated by financial exigencies, the Montclair sales -- if allowed to proceed -- will set another sorry example of an institution cashing out on art in the public trust.

p>Opened in 1914, the small, neoclassical Montclair Art Museum has long boasted an impressive collection of American art, with a sizable selection of work by Hudson River School painter George Inness, who settled in the town at the end of the 19th century. The museum has also acquired and displayed a large collection of Native American art and mounted critically acclaimed exhibitions. A show exploring the influence of Cézanne on American art, 10 years in the making, is scheduled to open this September. An exhibition of Wyeth-family paintings is now on view.

In the stewardship of its permanent collection, however, Montclair has left a more questionable legacy. The museum has often treated its record of local philanthropy as trade-in art. Nobody knows this better than Cherry Provost, a former trustee who grew up in the shadow of this suburban museum and still serves on the art committee.

"I've said it repeatedly: A museum is not a private collection," she maintains. Over the years, her words fell on deaf ears as the museum sold off one part of its collection after another. "We had a snuff bottle collection of the first order," Mrs. Provost says. "I tried to save it. We also had a fabulous collection of early American and English silver -- to die for! And we had some lovely sideboards. Really good American antiques. And it was wonderful to have a sideboard. Well, the sideboard went."

That wasn't all. This past January, the museum shipped off its 6,000-volume art library as a gift to a local college, Montclair State University -- one of its many emergency actions, which include layoffs and reduced business hours, designed to shore up expenses. The museum says it also plans to sell its costume and rug collections and is determining what to do with its sizable Native American holdings.

By narrowing or "refining" a collection through deaccession, a museum can perform a valuable function. It can free up from storage work that may be second-rate or repetitive and return it to the marketplace, there to be purchased by an individual or institution that could make better use of it. A museum can furthermore raise money in a restricted endowment from the sale, to be used for the purchase of art that might better serve its mission. Peer-review organizations such as the Association of Art Museum Directors issue guidelines that define such acceptable practices. The AAMD also forbids museums from using the sale of art in their permanent collections to pay for general operating expenses or to underwrite loans with the art on the walls. Such rules are designed to prevent museums from treating their art collections as ATM machines, sources for fast money that should have been raised and managed in other ways.

Even before the economic downturn, however, museums had been finding ways around AAMD in a power struggle between directors and trustees, who want to unlock the value of their collections, and the museum-going public, which feels betrayed by the institutions that are designed to preserve and honor donations.

Museums have claimed, for example, that the art in their permanent collections suddenly does not fit their mission statements, even if the work has been on display for generations. Museums have decided that certain works of art are of secondary importance because they are rarely shown, although this record of exhibition may merely reflect the taste of the curators. Museums have also declared themselves to be schools or libraries, not bound by the rules of AAMD. As permanent collections have been put up for sale, the auction houses, of course, have only profited from the row.

In 2006 the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., sold $68 million of its collection of older art in order to raise its endowment for contemporary work, claiming the older art did not fit its mission statement. In December the National Academy Museum in New York sold two valuable Hudson River School paintings to fill a budget gap, proclaiming its primary status as an art school. In a case earlier this year that attracted national attention, the trustees of Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., announced plans to shut down the school's Rose Art Museum and sell off the entire collection to raise general revenue. Legislation now under consideration in New York state would codify AAMD's most basic recommendations into law, allowing for the possibility of greater enforcement.

On Nov. 20, 2008, the Association of American Museums issued a statement designed to protect our nation's permanent collections in times of crisis: "There is increasing pressure on museums to capitalize their collections and to use them as collateral for financial loans to the museum. The AAM Code of Ethics for Museums requires that collections be 'unencumbered,' which means that the collections cannot be used as collateral for a loan."

Yet while museums are forbidden from "capitalizing" their collections, or using the value of their art as collateral for a loan, nothing in the AAM or AAMD rules explicitly prevents museums from selling their art along certain subjective guidelines, earmarking that revenue for future acquisitions, and then using the endowment money raised from the sales to back their loans. In both cases, art in the permanent collection has been capitalized. By taking the extra step of selling the art first, however, museums avoid the censure of AAMD while still underwriting loans that may go to general operating expenses or the next vanity expansion project.

This dangerous gap in the guidelines -- one that puts our nation's permanent collections at risk -- the Montclair Art Museum now plans to exploit. In 2001, the museum undertook a massive $14.5 million expansion that more than doubled its size and saddled it with debt. Now, as its overall endowment has dipped 25%, to $6 million from $8 million, the museum risks not having enough cash on hand to back its loans. That's where this deaccession comes in -- to raise cash to satisfy the requirements of its bank bonds. What's most troubling is that nothing on the books is designed to stop it, even though Montclair is liquidating art in its permanent collection to raise the aggregate collateral for its loans -- precisely what AAMD claims to oppose.

In an interview, Lora Urbanelli, the new director of the Montclair Museum and a member of AAMD, is upfront about the exigencies of her deaccession: "We took out tax exempt bonds at a certain time in our history. And when you do that -- we are diligently paying them off -- but whenever you do that, as part of the agreement, you agree to have a certain amount on hand in an endowment fund. At times when our endowment is flagging, we go below that line. So this is a creative way to keep the endowment full and to stay above the water line to grow our endowment for acquisitions -- just so we are in the good graces with the bond covenants. All the bank wants to know is that the endowment is a healthy one for the size of the institution. There's nothing untoward. There is nothing to hide. The deaccessioning that we're about to do has been more or less in the works for years. What we're doing now is considering an acceleration of a process. . . . The AAMD sees no problem with the way we are handling this situation."

Ms. Urbanelli presents her deaccession as a convenient way to solve her museum's financial problems. AAMD may never have anticipated this particular case of cash for art, but Montclair is nevertheless overstepping a more basic tenet of ethical conduct. The "decision to deaccession a work of art," according to AAMD, "should not be made in reaction to the exigencies of a particular moment."

The exigencies in the Montclair care are reason alone to question the sales, not to "accelerate the process," as Ms. Urbanelli maintains. If allowed to proceed, a museum will have found another way to monetize its collection without consequence, exposing another failure in the way our arts institutions police themselves. "I'm not saying every one of those paintings is a masterpiece," Mrs. Provost, the former Montclair trustee, notes of the auction, "but I've been involved with voting a lot of those paintings in. And there's a reason for every painting." As one museum after another announces deaccession plans as done deals -- "accelerations of a process" that take advantage of lax regulations -- patrons such as Mrs. Provost are right to become concerned. Montclair gives us another reason to worry about a future of art in the public mistrust.

Shock Value

PROTO MAGAZINE:
the magazine of Massachusetts General Hospital
Spring 2009

Shock Value
by James Panero

CLICK HERE FOR SLIDESHOW

In 1926, Otto Neurath, the Austrian philosopher of science, christened the 1900s the “century of the eye”: “Wall posters call out to us from the streets and hallways; exhibitions are inviting us; millions of people are watching the motion picture screens every evening....”

For the health sciences, this development became a lifesaver. In a time before preventive medicine, the containment of infectious diseases depended on widespread awareness. To broadcast prevention strategies, public health agencies developed (in a modern phrase) multimedia campaigns consisting of radio advertising, pamphleteering and posters.

“Media technology was as much of a magic bullet as vaccines were,” argues Michael Sappol, the curator of “An Iconography of Contagion: An Exhibition of 20th-Century Health Posters From the Collection of the National Library of Medicine.” The show will travel to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this September. With 22 posters from the United States and abroad, the show breaks ground by examining the art as well as the science of health campaigns, which employed modernist style to great effect.

“La course à la mort,” by Charles Emmanuel Jodelet, the oldest work in the show, calls to mind nineteenth-century caricature. Death, personified as a hooded skeleton, watches a race between tuberculosis, syphilis and cancer. As is typical of the time, text, rather than image, communicates the essential information; in this case, the annual death rates in France from the three diseases. The lesson is that the two contagious diseases lead the pack—and the public should avoid them.

Following perhaps a decade later, “Atisch” (Achoo) sounds a clear call to action in a more abstract way. Inspired by the flatness and the economy of line seen in Art Nouveau and Art Deco, Danish cartoonist Storm P shows a man sneezing on a disapproving crowd. The figure and the caption—“Thus begins an epidemic”—are easily grasped from a distance.

Another decade, another style: “She may be.. a bag of TROUBLE” recalls the style of pulp novels and pinups. “Posters about VD were meant to incite anxiety and also give pleasure,” says Sappol. This one, targeted at GIs in Europe, was intended to reduce the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea.

The exhibit’s most innovative image, “No home remedy or quack doctor ever cured syphilis or gonorrhea,” by Leonard Karsakov, takes its cue from Russian constructivist art, merging images and text, and Dada collage to form a patient made up of newspaper

After the Second World War, as health services focused more on preventive science than public awareness, came a downturn. Then the rise of a plague no science could prevent—AIDS—led to a rebirth. “Discover safer sex” uses the image of a sexually ambiguous couple to shock and intrigue. Nuance and artistry may have been lost, but 100 years on, the arts continue to play a role in the fight against infectious illness.

The New York fairs (April 2009)

THE NEW CRITERION
April 2009

The New York fairs
by James Panero

On 1Q2US, the Winter Antiques Show 2009, The Armory Show, The Art Show, and “Placing Avery: Paintings and Prints from the Collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art” at the UBS Gallery, New York.

“The art market is less ethical than the stock market.” Such was the motion at an Oxford–style debate I attended several weeks ago produced by Intelligence Squared U.S., the three-year-old American reincarnation of a British debate series. Sponsored by Robert Rosenkranz, IQ2US is a hot ticket, and this evening’s debate felt downright personal. The art market, at one time the small preserve of a handful of dealers and collectors, has been transformed—deformed might be more like it—into a headline-making enterprise of price indices, complex financial instruments, and bewildering speculation. Just what happened? Had the art market become a more unethical version of the stock market, a haven for manipulation and crooks? The people demanded answers.

Well, it wasn’t much of a debate at all. I wouldn’t even call it a show trial. At IQ2US the live audience votes on the motion twice during the evening—once at the beginning and again at the end of the session. The results at this particular event were appalling, as far as the art world was concerned. At the start of the night, 32 percent of the audience agreed with the motion that the art market is less ethical than the stock market, 30 percent were against, and 38 percent were undecided. After the debate, the art market was the clear loser: 55 percent of the audience agreed with the motion, 33 percent were against the motion, while only 12 percent remained undecided.

Okay, well, if you must know, the three panelists assigned to speak against the motion—Amy Cappellazzo of Christie’s auction house, the artist Chuck Close, and the critic Jerry Saltz—each did a terrible job, failing to address the resolution and instead offering blanket pronouncements. “I don’t think that the value of art is determined by money at all,” said Close to a healthy round of applause (thanks, Chuck). Meanwhile Jerry Saltz came off as Hopperesque—Dennis Hopperesque: “Art is a necessity, okay? It changes the world. It won’t reduce the incidence of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa but it does change the world incrementally, and/or by osmosis, okay? … Art dealers, a lot of them are missing the same chromosome. You know?”

You know, Jerry, if you mean the chromosome that predisposes one to bloviation, the dealers Richard Feigen and Michael Hue-Williams, speaking in favor the motion, might agree with you, okay? Hue-Williams, a British dealer, decried the lost virtue of “dictum meum pactum”—“My word is my bond,” the motto of the London stock exchange. Feigen, one of New York’s finest secondary dealers who has recently focused on the Old Master market, brought up the dubious auction-house practice of “chandelier bids.” Employed to lift a work up to its undisclosed reserve price, chandelier bidding describes the common occurrence of auctioneers pointing up at the ceiling to recognize nonexistent buyers. It’s all perfectly legal, but perhaps less than ethical. “Whereas regulations exist in the stock market to provide transparency,” argued Feigen, “chandelier bidding is specifically designed to deceive, to imply that there is competition when there isn’t any.”

The evening raised more questions than it answered: Is the art market inherently less ethical than the stock market—or merely vulnerable to unethical manipulation? How does the art market’s lack of regulation relate to its ethics? Are more regulated markets more ethical? (The case of Bernard Madoff would indicate otherwise; he could never have perpetuated his fraud without the seal of approval of governmental regulatory agencies.)

The dynamics of the evening, however, told the underlying story of the art market’s recent transformation. On one side were the dealers and the gallery owners. On the other were the auction houses and their defenders. Indeed, the origin of today’s speculative art market can be attributed to the new prominence of the auction houses, especially the advent of their contemporary art divisions. The auction house system, which supplanted the closed world of the dealership/gallery system as market leader within the last generation, has shifted the focus of art from objects of aesthetic delectation into assets of speculation. If the art market is now less ethical than the stock market—and I’m still not convinced it is—the reason can be found in this exchange of artistic value for retail value, encouraged and facilitated by the auction houses.

The rise of the auction houses, indirectly at least, has furthermore led to the creation of online price databases and metrics to track art as investments. Here, contemporary work has been favored over older art for the simple reason that the uniqueness of older lots (in attribution, provenance, and condition) precludes lay investors from tracking work comparatively. Not too long ago, one art investor explained to me his preference for Josef Albers. Because much of Albers’s work is a variation on the same abstract theme, my investor friend had more comparable price points. Albers’s auction prices could therefore be tracked without any understanding of connoisseurship or even the need to see the work in person.

Now, let me say that I know people who work at auction houses. Many of them care deeply about art. Nevertheless, the auctions have fostered an atmosphere that has allowed art to be treated like hog futures, making many collectors rich and even helping out a few contemporary artists (like Chuck Close) by pushing up the prices of their work to unsustainable levels.

Auction houses have encouraged the inflation of art prices and have profited as a result. Yet they have done less for the preservation of art than that creaking old world of galleries and private dealerships. Today, galleries continue to educate the public with thoughtful free exhibitions. Galleries create markets for artists and manage them. Good dealers search for the right buyers, not just the highest bidders. And the gallery world is still based on personal interactions and therefore more honor-bound than the auction houses for the work they sell, not only because of the laws of the Uniform Commercial Code but also because, for a respected dealer, your word is still your bond.

I like to keep this in mind whenever considering the phenomenon of art fairs. There is much to lament in their recent prominence: the creation of billboard-sized work, and the circus-like atmosphere one finds at these temporary art malls. Yet it is important to remember that the art fairs are dealer fairs—in many ways, the gallery system’s public answer to the auction houses. They offer a way for dealers, artists, and collectors all to meet in one place and transact the business of art as it’s done best—face to face. As the art market contracts, and fewer buyers compete for work, the art fairs still serve an important social function, helping galleries and dealers protect their artists and position them for better times ahead.

It is the inevitable fate of the Winter Antiques Show that this fair takes place over the bleakest winter week in New York.[1] Did anyone ever think of calling this the Autumn Antiques Show? The Park Avenue Armory, which houses the fair, is usually surrounded by sheets of ice and blankets of blowing snow during the run. The week-long duration of this fair also abuses the gallery employees who must staff it. Starting around day five, most everyone looks peaked.

Yet the Winter Antiques Show 2009 featured the single best booth I’ve seen at the fairs this season. The private photography dealer Hans P. Kraus Jr. converted his booth into a recreation of Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen’s turn-of-the-century 291 Gallery, officially known as the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession. “Influenced by various European design movements, Arts & Crafts, Symbolism, and Japonisme,” Kraus wrote in a brochure accompanying the show, “Steichen created a new kind of gallery space that was itself a work of art.”

At the Antiques Show, Hans Kraus duplicated the look of 291 down to the color on the walls and the lighting fixtures on the booth ceiling, which he had specially reproduced. It didn’t hurt that Kraus also displayed some of the finest photographic work to pass originally through 291, including Stieglitz’s wonderful carbon print of Winter—Fifth Avenue (1893), where the rough texture of the white photographic paper reflects the blizzard within. Among several other excellent booths at the Winter Antiques Show, including a fine selection of folk art by New Haven’s Giampietro gallery, Kraus demonstrated how quality work and an artful, educational presentation can best extend a gallery’s mission at an art fair.

The Art Show, produced by the Art Dealers Association of America at the Armory a month later, remains the preeminent gathering of New York dealers.[2] Here, the best booths were often those devoted to small surveys of single artists—for example, the American watercolorist Charles Burchfield at DC Moore. There were also several excellent paintings by Larry Rivers at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which now represents the estate.

But for her selection of work by the realist Rackstraw Downes, Betty Cuningham Gallery gets the blue ribbon for best in show. In Downes’s remarkable work, the mundane cityscape never looked so fascinating. His painting George Washington Carver Houses 102nd St. Between Park and Madison (2008), crafted down to the tiniest speck of detail, recalls the awesome power of Frederic Church and reminds us of the great wealth of visual information that can be contained in oil on canvas.

Unlike the cooperative ADAA Show, the annual Armory Show—named after the 1913 Armory show and housed on the Hudson River piers—is by now a division of a corporate conglomerate with the romantic name of “Merchandise Mart Properties Inc.”[3] This contemporary art fair has risen with the tide of the contemporary markets, growing into a frothy spectacle that fills New York’s cavernous Pier 94.

This year’s fair, perhaps surprisingly in a down economy, reached record attendance. Spectators like me wanted to see if the fair would still be a spectacle. This became a spectacle in itself. Yet The Armory Show has a good residual effect on New York, even if it can be a zoo, since it spawns several other art fairs and art events timed to Armory weekend. This includes a series of exhibitions and performances in the living rooms of bohemian Bushwick, Brooklyn through an event called “Site Fest” (here I particularly enjoyed the electric violinist Sean Hagerty’s street-corner performance organized by the gallerist Jason Andrew).

The real surprise of Armory ’09 came in its introduction of a modernist selection of galleries next door on the long Pier 92, a light-filled space the fair used up until a couple years ago. Here, a few galleries from the ADAA fair made another appearence, and several modernist galleries put on excellent shows: a Martín Ramírez survey at Ricco/ Maresca, a James Castle survey at Fleisher/ Ollman, Burgoyne Diller at Spanierman Modern, a few fine limoges-like paintings by Nancy Lorenz at James Graham, and a couple of Fausto Melotti sculptures and a Giorgio Morandi landscape at Studio La Città.

Alas, the fairs are now closed. So let me offer a parting word about an exhibition at the UBS Gallery on view through the end of the month. Located in the UBS building on Sixth Avenue, interrupted by elevator bells and lunchtime conversations, “Placing Avery: Paintings and Prints from the Collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art” is a far more substantial exhibition of Milton Avery’s work than you might expect to find in an office lobby.[4]

There are many excellent Averys here (Waterfall [1954]). There are also a few duds (Two Clowns [1937]). The exhibition presents a comprehensive scholarly effort to place Avery, an American original, in a larger artistic context (with works by Thomas Cole, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Marc Rothko).

But perhaps the best feature of the show is the guest book, where few of the witty comments fail to mention the financial sector’s recent shortfalls. My favorite went like this: “To Lawrence: if my account appreciates as well as this art—wow. You’re the man.” But that’s the great thing about great art, of course. No matter where the markets go, great art never stops being great.

Notes
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1. The Fifty-fifth Annual Winter Antiques Show was on view at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, from January 22 through January 31, 2009. Go back to the text.
2. The Art Show was on view at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, from February 19 through February 23, 2009. Go back to the text.
3. The Armory Show was on view at Piers 92 and 94, New York, from March 5 through March 8, 2009. Go back to the text.
4. “Placing Avery: Paintings and Prints from the Collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art” opened at the UBS Art Gallery, New York, on February 5 and remains on view through May 1, 2009. Go back to the text.