[MSN] Cashing in or selling out? A hot art market is too tempting for some institutions to ignore. That's not necessarily for the public good.

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Cashing in or selling out?
A hot art market is too tempting for some institutions to ignore. That's not
necessarily for the public good.

Photos:
http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-ca-art14jan14,0,6254835.s
tory?coll=cl-art

By Christopher Knight, Times Staff Writer

THIS is a tale of two de-accessions, the term used for the disposal of works
of art by a public institution, usually through sale. The practice is
legitimate but thorny - legitimate because any institution's leaders, who
benefit from public tax subsidy, must be free to make decisions they believe
to be in the public interest; and thorny because the public is rarely
unanimous in deciding what its interests are. De-accessioning often raises
hackles.

Hackle-raising is what happened with these two cases - one in Buffalo, N.Y.,
the other in Philadelphia - although the specifics could not be more
different. Together they represent the range of issues surrounding art's
disposal.

They also demonstrate why every instance is unique. Professional guidelines
for de-accessioning do exist, but they are rules of thumb, not law.

Philadelphia's Thomas Jefferson University has negotiated the sale of Thomas
Eakins' monumental 1875 masterpiece, "The Gross Clinic." This disturbing,
epochal image of a doctor working on a patient before students in a surgical
amphitheater dramatically intersects art with science as the engine of
modern knowledge. Customarily regarded as the greatest 19th century American
work of art, its price tag is $68 million.

Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery, meanwhile, is selling more than 170
paintings, sculptures and decorative objects. Surprisingly, the forthcoming
sale was announced in November, before a final checklist was compiled. But
quality-wise, several works known to be headed to auction are so important
that they have the market salivating.

One is an imposing, life-size granite figure of the Hindu god Shiva, seated
atop a stylized lotus, carved in Southern India during the Chola dynasty of
the 10th or 11th century. Another is an exceptionally rare bronze wine
vessel, cast more than 3,000 years ago in Shang dynasty China.

Perhaps most striking is a large sculpture depicting the Olympian goddess
Artemis, Apollo's twin, shown with an emblematic sacred deer by her side.
Made during the late-Hellenistic or early-Roman Imperial era and estimated
to be worth at least $5 million, the sculpture is ranked by scholars among
the top tier of Classical bronzes in America. (Like the Shang wine vessel,
rarity is part of the reason: Large ancient bronzes were often melted down
to retrieve the metal, so only a fraction survive.) Given the
much-publicized problem of looted antiquities entering public and private
collections during the last three or four decades, the offering of an
ancient masterpiece with a pristine title and ownership history - the museum
acquired it in 1953 - is likely to attract many eager buyers.

Similarities - and differences

HOWEVER different the case in Buffalo is from the one in Philadelphia, the
two have this important characteristic in common: Both feature unassailable
masterpieces that have been in public collections for decades (in the Eakins
case, for more than a century), and the decision to wrest them loose now is
being driven by today's booming art market. Prices for established
masterworks, never modest, have become astronomical. The art's stewards have
decided to cash in.

The aggressive market is operating as a passive but powerful vacuum,
literally tearing important paintings and sculptures from public walls and
civic galleries. Current levels of public protection are not strong enough,
and we risk the loss of irreplaceable treasures. Standards need to change.

The disposal of art that is poor quality, severely damaged, stolen, fake or
outside an institution's established collecting area is routine - for
example, the Getty Museum's forthcoming sale of 39 mediocre paintings from
its storage room. Yet I dare say that neither Buffalo nor Philadelphia would
be the focus of de-accessioning controversies had the last decade's steep
spike in art prices not occurred. Without it, the brilliant art now being
sent to market like a fatted calf would not be changing hands.

Jefferson and the Albright-Knox are selling for the same reason -
fundraising - but with different goals. Jefferson is a medical school, not a
museum, and the de-accession income will help underwrite a $400-million
campus expansion. In announcing the Albright-Knox sale, a museum spokesman
said the objects were chosen because they fall outside "the core mission" of
collecting Modern and contemporary art. The $15 million the museum hopes to
earn at Sotheby's will be added to the $58-million endowment.

The Jefferson case is convoluted. According to published reports, university
trustees approached Christie's auction house in August. Christie's, advising
a private sale, contacted representatives of the planned Crystal Bridges
Museum of American Art in rural Arkansas, whose benefactor, Wal-Mart heiress
Alice Walton, has been spending top dollar to build a collection from
scratch.

Walton's advisor is Princeton's patrician art historian, John Wilmerding.
(His great-grandparents, Henry and Louisine Havemeyer, were among the
foremost benefactors of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, while his
grandmother, Electra Havemeyer Webb, was the first great champion of
American folk art.) Washington's National Gallery of Art, where Wilmerding
was once a curator and now serves on its trustees' council, was brought in
as a partner, and the deal was struck.

When the plan went public in November, the yowling rattled the rafters.

Jefferson staff and alumni had obvious reasons to complain, but the
Philadelphia art establishment was faced with the loss of a peerless
homegrown treasure. Yet their moral objections were blurred by the fact that
they were already heartily engaged in "the rape of the Barnes" - a shady
maneuver by which the city managed to snag from a neighboring county the
greatest privately assembled collection of Post-Impressionist and early
Modern art. The local establishment is wrecking the Barnes' irreplaceable
value as a cultural monument, while squandering $200 million in charitable
funds to move it downtown.

Still, its leaders set out to match the $68-million offer for the Eakins.
With about half that amount currently pledged and the remainder guaranteed
by a local bank's bridge loan, shared title to the painting is expected to
pass from Jefferson to the Philadelphia Art Museum and the Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts at the end of January.

If I were Alice Walton, I would reconsider the quality of the advice I was
getting. Yes, $68 million is a lot of money. With the exception of Asher B.
Durand's 1849 "Kindred Spirits," bought by Walton's museum for $35 million,
it's more than any 19th century American painting is known to have fetched
by a factor of at least five. Still, my first thought on hearing of the sale
was, "What a steal!" The caliber of the masterpiece, coupled with the state
of today's art market, made the price seem low.

A local outcry in opposition to the painting leaving town was also
predictable. The neophyte collector, with a fortune estimated by Forbes at
$18 billion, could easily have put the picture beyond competitive reach
while feeling no pain. She didn't, and the prize was lost.

Likewise, Jefferson trustees must now be wondering whether the sale did in
fact maximize the monetary value of their asset. With more than one party
able to pony up the asking price, the bar wasn't high enough.

Regardless, we all owe the university a deep debt of gratitude. By
negotiating only with public art museums, an irreplaceable masterpiece was
kept from disappearing into a private collection. That counts for a lot.
Would that the Albright-Knox had been so public-spirited.

Opinions differ as to the wisdom of the Buffalo de-accession. Tom L.
Freudenheim, former assistant secretary at the Smithsonian Institution and
director of several museums (and a Buffalo native), lambasted the sale -
convincingly - in the Wall Street Journal.

The dubious claim advanced by current Albright-Knox leadership puts
Greco-Roman, Shang and Chola dynasty sculptures outside the museum's
better-known specialization in Modern and contemporary art. Yet a 1979
collection catalog published by the museum took a more nuanced and
enlightened view: "The acquisitions policy of the Gallery has long held that
efforts to add certain works which elucidate affinities and parallels with
the art of modern times is an important pursuit." All art, no matter when or
where it was made, lives in the present.

Keeping the public in mind

BUT the customary objections to an extraordinary de-accession program also
apply. Museum staff and trustees are transient stewards for a civic legacy,
and they have no right to dispose of it. Pruning mediocrity, as the upcoming
Getty sale will do, is part of the curatorial job, but shipping masterpieces
to the auction block, as the Albright-Knox is doing, is just mercenary.

The public loses. With the tax-exempt museum as guardian, the public has
owned the magnificent "Bronze Figure of Artemis and the Stag" for 54 years.
(I had the pleasure of first seeing it in Buffalo in the early 1970s.) After
Sotheby's June auction, however, it could easily disappear from public view
- into a Park Avenue apartment, a dacha outside Moscow or another private
destination. The Albright-Knox, unlike Jefferson University, did not try to
place the treasure in one of the handful of American art museums that
actively collect antiquities, where continuing public access would be
assured.

Every American museum must place its own self-interest in the foreground.
But professional standards should also instinctively privilege the public
over the private marketplace, acting as a check on its inevitable excesses.
The Assn. of Art Museum Directors requires that de-accessioning be governed
by a member institution's written collection management policy. (The
Albright-Knox declined a request to review its policy, saying through a
spokesman that it is an internal working document.) It should strengthen
that constraint by requiring that objects of substantial value be offered to
other museums first.

Once an important object has left the art market and entered a public
collection, powerful mechanisms ought to be in place to keep it there. Yet
no such mechanism currently exists. With the art market in the stratosphere,
its mighty pull demands a serious regulatory counterweight.

christopher.knight at latimes.com

http://www.calendarlive.com/