Hyperallergic: In the Know

James writes:

This week I am delighted to write the "In the Know" column for Hyperallergic.com. Who knew? What follows is my cross-borough survey:

Could there be anything better than New York City in the summer? The answer is assuredly, yes. Still, the five boroughs are an eden, and the Big Apple has never tasted sweeter, even when fully baked.

From the top, here are some recommendations. I should add that my three-year-old daughter had a hand in this list.

Let’s begin with Wave Hill in the Bronx. This garden estate overlooking the Palisades is Tuscany on the Hudson. On July 6 and 7, Target is offering “Welcome Home Weekend,” with free admission to mark the reopening of the Wave Hill House. It should be said that Wave Hill is perfect to visit anytime, because here is an institution that has bucked the trend of New York nonprofits and continues to offer tickets priced in the single digits. In addition to the gardens, Wave Hill supports an impressive exhibition program, family art projects every weekend, a charming shop — why would you leave, except to …

… visit Arthur Avenue, the Little Italy of the Bronx. This neighborhood just south of Fordham University is where we get our supply of burrata, hand-cut linguini, coal-fired Italian bread, and street-shucked clams.

Moving inside, enough good things can’t be said about the Metropolitan Museum’s rebooted European Paintings Galleries, 1250–1800. These rethought, reconfigured, reenergized rooms are an unassuming masterpiece. They look like they were always meant to be, familiar but better than you remembered. The Southern Renaissance now has a beginning. The Northern Renaissance now never ends. And while the tourists are getting punked, you have Vermeer, Bruegel, Velazquez, and Fragonard (daughter’s fav) just about all to yourself.  

Finally, a word about The Rockaways. They are back. While the beach at Fort Tilden remains closed, the west end of Jacob Riis Park, rehabilitated after Sandy, seems to have picked up the slack. The sand is freshly sifted. The plovers are nesting. I understand there is a bus. My daughter proclaims this to be the new “hipsah beece." After the year we've all had, it's a great thing to see.

Copycat Quandary

Edward C. Banfield

THE NEW CRITERION
April 2013

To the Editors:

James Panero writes in “The Culture of the Copy” (The New Criterion, January 2013) that my college professor Ed Banfield suggested museums sell their original works and replace them with passable facsimiles—a suggestion for which your founder Hilton Kramer criticized him. This gives the wrong impression. Ed thought many second-rate museums felt they had to purchase only original works, and, due to their very limited budgets, they could only afford second-rate art originals. As a result, museumgoers in smaller cities did not have the opportunity to view first-rate art. He thought that the Rockefellers and others had created copies of well-known works which were indistinguishable from the originals and which sold for relatively modest prices. Therefore, why not allow smaller, less wealthy museums to purchase these copies so their publics could view first-rate rather than second-rate art? It sounded reasonable to me when Ed proposed it, and it sounds reasonable to me now. I am at a loss to understand why the art community so violently objects to this.

Robert L. Freedman, Esq.
Philadelphia

James Panero replies:

The use of copies has an important place in the history of art. This is true especially when access to original artwork has been limited. Up through the first half of the twentieth century, plaster casts made from original sculptures were used widely as study aids in museums and art academies. By mid-century, however, these casts were removed from view. In part, American museums had by then come into possession of more original work. But I would also argue that copies came to be overly devalued in relation to originals, and this was unfortunate. I am glad to hear that the Metropolitan Museum now lends its plaster cast collection out to universities here and abroad. The art museum at Fairfield University in Connecticut, for example, currently displays several Met casts on long-term loan.

In other words, the idea of us allowing “smaller, less wealthy museums” to display copies “so their publics could view first-rate rather than second-rate art” was around long before Professor Banfield made his proposal concerning art copies in the early 1980s. One could say that art-library slide collections, and before that magic lantern projections, were all copies used in much the same way as those plaster casts. The same goes today for the high resolution digital scans available through initiatives such as Google Art Project.

In all of these cases, copies serve as necessary substitutes. Their availability has been widely beneficial to a public that might not otherwise have access to great works of art. And even when originals are available, reproductions have a place, because they don’t keep museum hours, and it’s not always possible to lecture about art in a gallery setting.

If Professor Banfield had suggested only that second-rate museums use their limited resources to purchase copies, as Freedman suggests, I agree that would have sounded reasonable. But Banfield suggested much more in his proposal, and the art community was right to object to it.

“I go further,” Banfield wrote in 1982, “Why should public museums not substitute reproductions for originals?” Kramer was therefore correct in giving the impression that Banfield advocated the wholesale deaccessioning, or selling off, of museum collections to fulfill his vision. Banfield’s arguments for this were esoteric at best, nonsensical at worst, but had something to do with a desire to see the “multibillion-dollar art business . . . fall into an acute and permanent recession.” Whatever the reasoning, it was an unreasonable and vastly destructive idea when Banfield proposed it. It remains so today in ideas such as the “Central Library Plan,” a proposal to remove the books and gut the stacks at the main branch of the New York Public Library, which I mention in my essay.

At the heart of these ideas is both a contempt for the art-going, book-reading public and the elitist sense that they either don’t deserve or cannot appreciate the real thing. “It would not be unduly cynical,” Banfield wrote in 1982, “to say that many of the thousands who stood in line for a ten-second look at ‘Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer,’ after the Metropolitan Museum paid $6 million to acquire it, would as willingly have stood to see the $6 million in cash.” Sorry, but to make such a statement is about as cynical as you can get.

Time to Free NY's Museums: The Met Responds

James writes:

Thomas P. Campbell, the Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has issued an "important message" responding to the criticism I and others have raised over the ticketing policies at his and other public-private institutions in New York City. The Director's affable but ultimately defensive message tells me the Met has heard the criticism but hasn't listened to it.

Two weeks ago in the New York Daily News, I wrote an editorial titled "It's Time to Free N.Y.'s Museums." Here I argued that "institutions on public land, supported in part by public funds," are designed to serve the public good. According to the Department of Cultural Affairs, this means providing "cultural services accessible to all New Yorkers”--regardless of their ability to pay. "Unfortunately," I wrote, just as "many members of the CIG [an alliance of public-private institutions] have improved their facilities over the years through better administration and aggressive fund-raising, they have also become far less accessible to ordinary people" through confusing ticketing policies designed to extract a greater toll at the turnstile.

The Metropolitan is now party to two lawsuits over the "recommended" language of its tickets, claiming that not all museum-goers understand the nuances of the suggested price. My survey of other NY's public-private institutions reveals that many of them impose even more restrictive and confusing rules at the turnstile.

In his response, Campbell says "our costs—everything from guards to insurance to publications—have increased." The Met plans to defend its admissions policy "vigorously."

The Met is clearly facing a growing crisis over its ticketing policies. The museum therefore could and should be using this opportunity to lead the way towards creating better admissions policies to the city's cultural institutions. At the Met this could mean bigger, better signage--in multiple languages--about the meaning of its "recommended" admissions fees. It could mean a new ad campaign in city neighborhoods about the availability of great art for a penny a subway ride away. Considering the Met draws significant taxpayer support and other benefits from city government--just under $25 million a year in direct city support and passed-through costs such as electricity, according to the report of its CFO--the Met could propose a new initiative to give free access to city residents, which would compel other institutions to do the same.

Instead, the Met has doubled down on its current policy. The reasons are predictable. Campbell is right that his museum needs the turnstile revenue to cover increasing costs. These costs include the salaries of Met employees. As I mentioned to Fred Dicker on "Live from the State Capital" (available at the top of this post), according to the Met's publically available tax returns from 2011, Mr. Campbell earned over $1 million in salary and benefits. At least ten Met employees bring home over half-a-million dollars a year while working (according to their own tax returns, at least) 35 hours a week . Here is a breakdown of those salaries from the museum's 990 tax filing. What if the Met were to post these numbers at their ticket gates?

This need for greater turnstile revenue may be one reason why the museum has turned to mounting critically panned, populist exhibitions such as "Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years." It's also why the Met has brought on a DJ as its new artist in residence and decided to open on Mondays.

But big business can be bad business at a non-profit designed to serve the public good. The ever-increasing demands of what I call the museum-industrial complex was the topic of my essay in The New Criterion a year ago, titled "What's a Museum?"

On the letter of the law, there may indeed be nothing to the Met lawsuits. But that doesn't mean the city's public-private institutions are fully living up to the spirit of their public mandates. When you are earning $1 million a year, indirectly in part through the taxpayer dime, it can be hard to understand the museum goer who can't afford $25 or regret the one who didn't know to pay less. It takes three hours working at minimum wage to earn enough to pay the Met's full "recommended" price. Working 35 hours a week, Tom Campbell earns that same amount every two and a half minutes. 

Throughout their history, the Met and the city's other public-private institutions have benefited from the generosity of New Yorkers. Their admissions policies should be as equally generous in return.