Art Lovers to the Met: Don’t Turn Old Masters into Cash to Balance the Books

Is America’s greatest museum looking for an easy way out of its COVID money crunch?

L ast week, Max Hollein, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said the museum was considering selling work from its collection to help it balance its budget. “It would be inappropriate for us not to consider it,” he said, “when we’re still in this foggy situation.” The “foggy situation” he cites is the financial mess — everywhere except among the very rich and the biggest corporations — caused by the COVID fiasco. I don’t think the honchos at the Met ever have giddy, spontaneous moments with reporters. The museum’s considering it seriously, if it hasn’t already budgeted the income.

My advice is simple. Don’t raid the collection for cash. The Met is America’s leading museum. It has no peer, but it sets a standard. If it flogs a few Renoirs to balance the books, no one will miss them. The museum’s collection numbers in the millions of objects. If the Met does it, though, trustees all across the country will squeeze their museums to do the same. And they’ll be a lot less judicious than the Met. The Met needs to set an example through restraint.

So what are the rules for selling museum art? They’re surprisingly few.

Museums are, as a general proposition, free to sell art to balance their budgets.

Art is like any other property a museum owns. It can be bought and sold. If the trustees accession an object, which means add it to the collection, it’s in the public trust. Trustees can deaccession it with a simple vote. If the art came to the museum with conditions, though, that can complicate things. A museum might take a gift of a painting, for instance, with a do-not-sell condition.

An aggressive art-for-cash scheme might provoke the state attorney general to raise a ruckus, but unless the museum is planning to spend the cash on Cadillacs for every trustee, which is beyond the scope of the museum’s mission, the AG won’t do anything, and neither will the courts.

The Association of Art Museum Directors (the professional association for many — but not all — art museums) has ethical guidelines. One of these guidelines, until recently, required member museums to use money from art they’ve sold only to buy more art.

That dusty old Murillo in the vault? Yes, the one with the Virgin with the goofy look and Baby Jesus in mid-belch. That can go on the block, and the money can be used to buy a bleeding-edge thing by that hot transgendered, undocumented, multipolar artist, you know, the one who molds in soil gathered from stolen Native land targeted for a new oil pipeline.

How is this rule enforced? This ethical standard was always porous. Museum sanctions are limited. No AAMD museum will lend art to a museum that broke the rule and bought those Cadillacs or fixed the roof or gave everyone raises or just used the money to keep the Repo Man at bay. Problems arose because some museums don’t do loan shows, so they don’t care about the ethics rule. The director of a museum in an art-for-cash scheme might be barred from AAMD meetings. But most museums aren’t members of AAMD anyway.

The principal enforcement mechanisms are shame and bad publicity. These don’t pack the old punch. The news cycle is now minutes, not days or weeks. The culture seems to favor doubling down.

Last year, AAMD did something astounding. Its board changed the rule to create a two-year window for museums to sell art for “collection care.” AAMD doesn’t define “collection care,” which means the individual museums define it, which means anything. It means conservation, curatorial and registrar salaries, and the utilities, since they service galleries, vaults, and offices. All a museum needs to do is disclose on its website that it sold art for collection care.

And under what circumstances could a museum liquidate art for money? Here, AAMD was also vague. “Financial hardship” caused by the COVID economic collapse was the standard — again, undefined.

Last year, I described the rule change as a nuclear tweak. When I was an AAMD member, only Holocaust-era restitution got more attention than the then high crime of selling art for budget relief. I wondered who initiated and stewarded the change. Nothing happens at AAMD unless the big museums like the Met, MoMa, and the National Gallery agree to it. Even if down-and-out museums were desperate after the coronavirus lockdowns whacked their admission, events, and shop income, the rule would stay pure if the big shots stood pat.

I since learned that MoMA in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art pushed the “collection care” change. I’m sure the Met agreed. The National Gallery has no dog in the fight, since it is government-funded. I thought, then and now, that the big boys want to use the changed rule for themselves, trickle-down effects for others be damned.

So the rule has changed, but under what circumstances can a museum deploy it? Last year, the Baltimore Museum of Art tried to sell $80 million to fund a diversity endowment and raise salaries. AAMD seemed, disastrously, to support the raid. After a rebellion by donors in Baltimore and former AAMD presidents nationally, the plan collapsed. AAMD then clarified the rule. To sell art and use the money for “collection care,” a museum needs to be broke, and broke from COVID specifically. This rule change was for emergencies, and, by the way, it expires after two years.

The Brooklyn Museum sold $35 million in art a few months ago, using the money to establish an emergency collection-care fund. It sold a Cranach painting of a skinny nude and the ugliest Corot imaginable. The Brooklyn Museum is chronically, famously broke. No one needed to be convinced that the COVID crisis pushed it closer to the brink.

The Met has taken a hit from the Chinese coronavirus lockdowns and panic, which together have devastated tourism in New York. It’s not desperate, though. No one knows how long the cabal of public-health zilches, a disaster-hungry press, teachers’ unions, and control-freak politicians will play the COVID card. It’s a virus, a serious one, but viruses are part of human existence. We need to live with this one, which means protecting the vulnerable and giving everyone else their lives back. As long as power and publicity are to be had, though, quacks like Fauci will keep the party going. They can’t help themselves.

So the Met has a budget hole. I think many of us, like me, are bemused by the Met’s financial woes, which have been in the news for years now, and we’re tired of hearing about them, too. Dan Weiss, the president of the Met, was hired in 2015 to right the Met’s finances, and after six years, the place is still short of money. His statement a couple of weeks ago that “we lose money every day we’re open” was ungracious, to say the least. The Met is a public gallery. It’s supposed to be open to the public. If it needs tons of paying visitors to stay in the black, it’s got a bad business plan.

The Met’s operating expenses last year were $287.6 million. This doesn’t include expenditures from restricted acquisitions funds and spending on building repairs, which is supported by capital fundraising. In its last annual report, covering the fiscal year ending June 30, 2020, the Met said it faced “losses of up to $150 million in total revenue and support possible through fiscal year 2021.”

I’m not sure why the Met is using the $150 million figure. Anything is “possible.” It’s “possible” I’ll join the French Foreign Legion, but let’s get real. You won’t see me wearing a beret and riding a camel in this lifetime. The intent might be to frighten trustees, donors, and the public as the Met prepares for its annual spring appeal. The museum brass might want to shock the art world into a mood of deference and submission. “Think about what we’ll have to cut,” it suggests, “if we don’t liquidate a few things no one ever sees.”

The art press, of whom I might be one of the few who can read a financial statement, has translated this statement, written in English, to another statement, also in English, proposing that the Met has a deficit of $150 million.

That would mean, kids, a deficit that’s half its budget. No museum is that incompetent. Only the federal government gets to spend 50 percent more money than it takes in, year after year.

The Met’s deficit for FY20 was $7.7 million. It earned $35 million in admission income, though that reflects no income from March through June because of the coronavirus lockdown. The Met describes last year’s fundraising as “strong.” Its endowment is $3.7 billion. It’s still earning admissions income, but it’s a fraction of what it was.

It’s not on the balls of its feet.

The museum’s income from admissions and retail has tanked. Two years ago, it levied a $25 admission charge, an outrageous abuse of not only foreign tourists but anyone who’s not from New York, which means the vast majority of Americans whose taxes subsidize the Met. Every dollar in the Met’s coffers, and every work of art it gets as a gift, is either tax-exempt or tax-deductible. No institution has made greater use of the federal charitable tax laws than the Met.

No one would have imagined the government would throttle life as we know it to fight a virus, since that’s never before been done in human history. Yet such are our hubristic, neurotic times.

I can’t fault the Met — too much — for hitching its balance sheet to the attendance star, though it seemed unwise to rely on astronomical, record-breaking attendance year after year. That said, the Met has been evolving into a business for some time. It relies too much on ticket, event, shop, and restaurant income.

Is selling art the answer? Looking at the Met’s financial statement, and knowing it has pots of hidden money, I’d say that its operating budget deficit for FY21 will be about $15 million. It has furloughed lots of staff and retired lots of longtime, expensive curators. It has assumed a big new expense — its diversity initiative. It has set up a new department and sensitivity-training bureaucracy.

The Met has a spending problem, not a revenue one. It does too many exhibitions. I’m surprised the museum isn’t downsizing beyond its early retirement package offered at the end of 2020. Its program staff is, for the most part, working from home.

It’s possible for some museum people to work virtually, but, as I’ve said a hundred times, I can’t imagine being productive as a curator if I were without a library, my files, my collection, and the public for more than a few weeks. So for months it was paying curators and probably many others for less-than-full-time work. Does it have too many curators? I think its exhibition program will be a shadow of its former self for years.

Employers are learning in the COVID catastrophe not only that they need less office space. They’re also learning that lots of expensive full-time staffers can be converted to independent contractors. The gig-work system already rules academia. Gig workers there are called adjuncts. It’ll come to museums, too, and hit curators and other high-income earners.

The Met’s venue income — admissions, shop, events, restaurant income — will take years to recover. Is it willing to sell millions in art this year to cover its deficits? It won’t have an easy time with the New York, national, and international art press.

I looked at the Met board. It’s got the best people, both in wealth but also in commitment to the museum and in highly evolved scruples. They think long-term, and they’re conscious of appearances. They’re not fly-by-nighters, cheapskates, or hayseeds. They’re as circumspect as trustees come. I think they’ll tell the administrators to cut spending.

What happens nationally if the Met starts to sell art to balance its budget? Thinking of the board of the Itsy-Bitsy Museum of Art in Flyover City, well, a trustee or two might be less evolved than the trustees at the Met. “Why should I open my wallet to cover a deficit,” one or two might think, “when this joint has art coming out of the rafters?” And they won’t just think it. They’ll say it. There are hundreds of art museums, historical societies, and house museums that live week by week. They’re often in places with small donor bases and where rich people are tapped to support multiple philanthropies.

“Well, the Met’s doing it,” the chorus will go. Christie’s and Sotheby’s surely have lists of the museums in financial ICU, if not packages identifying what could be sold. And it’s not only small, out-of-the-way museums. College art museums don’t have their own boards. They’re ruled by college trustees for whom the museum is only one of many places at the table. Often, college trustees know nothing about art. The directors of college museums aren’t well placed to fight. They rarely report to the college president. Their access to trustees is circumscribed. The college art museum could become an ATM.

One solution for the Met is a tourist economy that’s not dead. A culture sector with a pulse would help, too. Also in the news last week was the revelation that Governor Cuomo sent a Valentine from Hades to 15,000 nursing-home patients last year. He’s the best friend that funeral parlors have ever had. He also said he wouldn’t go to the theater again unless it had a new ventilation system and seats three feet apart. And everyone in the audience had a COVID passport. He forgot about hazmat suits. Culture in New York needs a savior, not a doomsayer.

It’s a dangerous game the Met seems to be playing. It’s the biggest and best museum in the country. I’ll channel Nancy Reagan, wherever she is, and suggest that, given the temptation to go the art-for-cash route, the masters of the Met should “just say no.”