Montclair responds

James writes:

Lora Urbanelli, the director of the Montclair Museum, appeared on WNYC today along with Arnold Lehman of the Brooklyn Museum to discuss their institutions' responses to the economic downturn. While we wait for the audiocast of this interview to be posted online, Urbanelli's appearance gives us another chance to review her letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal that appeared last Thursday:

In"Another Art Museum Puts Its Collection on the Block" (Leisure & Arts, April 15), James Panero engages in a serious discussion of the nature of deaccessioning and the responsibility that museums have to their communities to uphold their trust. The Montclair Art Museum's collection policy and plans came under review and he takes issue with our decision to deaccession selected items from our collection during a time of financial crisis. This is indeed a complex and topical issue that no museum undertakes lightly.

After a careful and strategic review of its operations and finances, the Montclair Art Museum has announced a comprehensive plan, of which deaccessioning is a part, addressing both short-term and long-term needs. The full description of this plan may be found on our Web site: montclairartmuseum.org. The deaccessioning component of the plan, part of a long-term strategy in place for many years, attempts to identify items that are duplicative, of lesser quality than objects already in our collection by the same artist, or are not consistent with the collecting mission of the museum. This effort will help to build our endowment for the future purchase of works of art.

Deaccessioning for acquisition funds, linked with the pressures put on our endowment by the market, has certainly created a complicated combination of circumstances. Nonetheless, our actions were undertaken after consulting with the president of the Association of Art Museum Directors. We are and have been following policy and conducting these transactions in a completely transparent manner.

Our responsibility is to ensure that the Montclair Art Museum's dedication to Native American and American art and culture can be served through new acquisitions, while assuring its ability to mount inspiring exhibitions and provide educational programs over the long term.

Lora Urbanelli

A "serious discussion"? A "complicated combination of circumstances"? It is reassuring to see that Urbanelli has taken more away from my article than certain online critics (here and here). These critics have merely nitpicked the details of the story rather than discuss the issues and implications of the case. But as I've already written, I forgive them. Professional jealousies keep this story in the spotlight.

Which brings me to Urbanelli. From my first conversation with her, which was courteous and high-minded, to the Journal letter, Urbanelli has been up front about the financial contingencies behind her deaccession. Urbanelli says she wants to be "transparent." This deaccession was first announced by Montclair, let's remember, in what the museum called a "financial security plan." Urbanelli justifies the sales by claiming that she is operating within the guidelines of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), the peer-review organization that advises museum propriety. True enough. As I argued in my initial Journal editorial, AAMD's signoff, by allowing a permanent collection to be liquidated for financial considerations, reveals a fundamental flaw in museum governance.

Where Urbanelli has been less than transparent, I believe, has been in her claim that the sales are primarily a result of curatorial housekeeping with only ancillary financial benefits. "The deaccessioning component of the plan," she writes, "part of a long-term strategy in place for many years, attempts to identify items that are duplicative, of lesser quality than objects already in our collection by the same artist, or are not consistent with the collecting mission of the museum."

So long as AAMD allows art acquisition funds--generated from sales--to serve double duty as banking instruments, all museums sales must be questioned. For the Montclair sales, I have expressed my doubts that their cull has been the result of pure curatorial decision-making, done outside of financial concerns. (The financial temptations of deaccession should be regulated away, argues former Whitney and SFMOMA director David Ross, and I agree.)

From my initial investigation I noticed that certain items in the Montclair sales appear in a book of highlights published by the museum--a strange place to see "duplicative" objects or works of "lesser quality." Now the blogger Lee Rosenbaum has gone the extra step of following through on more of the specific works up for auction. The results are even more alarming. Take a look at Rosenbaum's excellent reporting here and here. Rosenbaum undercuts Urbanelli's high-ground claims and casts the Montclair sales in further ignominy.

Why should this concern us? Because as I wrote in my Journal editorial, deaccessioning for financial gain addresses a short-run problem at the expense of the long-term public trust.

Hard edged in Brooklyn

Gabriele Evertz, Red + the Spectrum (2008) 

James writes:

Lately I have become interested in contemporary abstract painters who make abstraction the subject of their work. These artists, often through variations of hard-edged color contrasts, do more than merely "abstract" the visible world. They concern themselves with pushing abstraction's formal potential. Thornton Willis, one of these artists, just completed his latest run at Elizabeth Harris Gallery; I wrote the catalogue essay for the show (and participated in a video profile of the artist). James Little will open at June Kelly in Chelsea on May 7. Consider my calendar marked.

This past month, a four-person exhibition called "Color Exchange: Berlin/New York" has been on view at Metaphor Contemporary Art in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. This will be the show's final weekend. Catch it if you can.

I went to Metaphor to see the work of the Berlin-born Gabriele Evertz, a scholar of color and line. The three other painters in this show, all accomplished, use abstraction for its allusive depth: Julian Jackson makes cinematic flashes and gauzy colored landscapes; Susanne Jung offers up austere monochromes that read like blizzard whiteouts, Gabriele Schade-Hasenberg builds up glazed surfaces that obscure secrets beneath. Evertz's work, however, operates entirely on the surface through an interplay of dominant and recessive colors and the width and angle of lines. It reaches out, rather than pulling you in. Seen in person these paintings come alive through intense harmonic disturbances. Evertz pushes color's potential in new and interesting ways. I've never encountered anything quite like it. The term "Op Art" would not do it justice. Her Red and the Spectrum (2008), five feet square and the largest work in the show, is a sublime visual terror (you can see what it looks like above, but be aware that this painting's optical effects do not work in reproduction). This user-driven art is activated entirely by the sense of sight, and supremely accomplished. It deserves to be seen in person.

Responding to the Montclair critics

James writes:

Over the weekend, the former director of the Whitney Museum, David Ross, published a letter in the Wall Street Journal seeking to apply the lessons of my Montclair editorial to the rulebook for all museums:

Museums will lose the public trust if they evolve into vehicles for holding long-term assets until they are needed for the purposes of loan repayment or assessments of credit-worthiness. In fact, lenders and bondholders should be prohibited by law from accepting acquisition-specific endowments as security in any form. That would take the idea of misusing collections off the boardroom table, and would go some distance toward securing these collections for future generations.

That's good advice. But alas, it looks like not everyone got Ross's memo.

The art critic for the Los Angeles Times, Christopher Knight, usually sound on the issue of deaccession, had a momentary lapse of reason over my editorial. In a blog posting called "Bada bing: A hit job on a New Jersey art Museum?," Knight claimed that his "eyes bugged out" after reading my editorial "five or six times now."

First off, let me review the charge that my article was a "hit job." Knight claims to have "fact-checked" my story and found it "strictly circumstantial," but it seems that he did little more than pick up the telephone in California and make a long-distance call to representatives of the museum. Well, I talked to the museum representatives at length too, but I also visited the museum on several occasions, obtained the Christie's sales prospectus, and interviewed sources close to the museum both on and off the record. For example, I have it on good authority that the museum's deacessioning campaign has increased by ten times in the past six months. I also have sources knowledgeable of the museum's collection who have questioned the purported redundancy of key works in the sale (certain works even appear in the museum's published book of highlights from its collection).

This deaccession therefore did not strike me as wholly the product of a careful and deliberative process. It needs to be examined more closely under the light of day, which was the purpose (and I am happy to say, the result) of my editorial. Unlike Knight, who seems to care about little more than attacking a journalist's reputation (I notice he goes about collecting only the evidence he wants to hear), I have an affection for the Montclair Museum and the art inside it. I've done the heavy lifting to find out what's happening at the institution. Why would I take out a "hit job" on a museum I care about?

In fact, the only "hit job" is the one Knight decided to take out on me. I can't say why he did it, nor do I really care. By identifying me in his first paragraph as the managing editor of "the conservative culture magazine the New Criterion," as though this were relevant to the facts of the case, I can only assume that Knight had his feelings hurt by Hilton Kramer twenty years ago and now I'm paying for it. As long as he spells my name right, I appreciate the attention, but I am concerned that Knight's attempted rub out will distract us from the real subject at hand: the future of a small New Jersey Museum with an important permanent collection, and the implication of its actions on the stewardship of art in the public trust across the country. So let's step out of the henhouse for a moment and out of earshot of tongue-clucking bloggers like Tyler Green and review the facts of the case.

Knight says he read my article "five or six times." If he doesn't want to try a seventh, let me help him understand my editorial—I expect we are in agreement on most of the key points:

1) recent deaccessioning campaigns at several museums have betrayed the public trust. I discuss this not to reveal some "nefarious plot," but to put the Montclair story in context. In a general interest publication such as The Wall Street Journal, such a discussion is not "boilerplate," but exposition.

2) The Montclair art museum is engaging in a deaccessioning campaign. Since other campaigns at other museums haven't always gone well, let's therefore look at this case closely.

3) Well, as it turns out, this campaign is being done (in whole on in part—the ethics of the case are still the same) in order to back the museum's bonds.

4) In fact, when pressed, the Montclair museum director is upfront about this contingency. She defends her actions by claiming that the peer-reviewed organization AAMD has no problem with the sales.

5) Now this raises a greater question--if museums are forbidden from collateralizing their bonds with the art on their walls, is it appropriate that they should be able to sell the art and use the proceeds to back their bonds?

Knight writes that "opinions are nice, but they're better when built atop some reported facts." My editorial had both. Let's move on from quibbling and have a substantive discussion about the opinions I expressed and the issues I raised. Let's also help deaccession dissenters like the former Montclair trustee Cherry Provost have their day in the court of public opinion. David Ross got it right.