Museum Art Vaults, Raided for Cash?

The COVID lockdowns have spawned a bad idea: sell art to shore up bloated budgets.

L ast week, I wrote about good news from European museums. Museums in Paris, Dublin, London, and Florence announced initiatives directly related to . . . drum roll, whistles, 76 trombones, and shocked and awed gasps . . . art, of all things. We shouldn’t be shocked and awed. Through schisms, invasions, wars, despotism, and depressions, from Huns to Flagellants, Jacobins, Reds, and Nazis, custodians of heritage in the Old World keep their collective eye on what’s sculpted, painted, gilded, and wrought.

Evidently, not so much here in America. I can’t remember a week of more mirthless news in the museum world. Grabby hands aren’t in the till. They’re in the vault, trying to raid art for cash. “Money can’t buy me love,” the Beatles sang, but it does pay the electric bill and helps balance budgets.

It used to be that people talked about the art in museums. Now, we’re told “a toxic work environment” is mostly to be found in a museum setting. Don’t believe cranks peddling horror stories about racism and sexism running wild in museums, or don’t believe them all the time. And then there’s another chapter in the museum race wars, this time at the Detroit Institute of Arts. How trustees there handled charges that their director is an evildoer shows they need an intervention, or at least some lessons in basic fairness.

I’ll write about a tight vote last week at the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD). Next time, I’ll write about trustees throwing their directors to the woke wolves.

Last year, in a panic, AAMD allowed museums, for two years only, to sell art and use the money for emergency budget relief, with guidelines that are too vague. Prior to this, money made from selling art could be spent only to buy new art. Lots of mischief ensued, as I expected. Last week, proponents of making art-for-cash raids permanent tested the waters in a vote of AAMD members. They came up short, 88–91.

Why is this important? American museums steward hundreds of billions of dollars in art. They’re icons of civic pride. They’re keepers of heritage. That’s a trio of weighty charges. And our museums, more or less, are self-regulating. For 200 years, the system has worked well, and worked wonders. As the country has grown rich, we made culture a priority. Americans are naturally generous, and that’s made a difference. Self-regulation means self-control. Given the number of museums and the value of their collections, scandals are very rare.

For years, AAMD was stalwart in protecting museum art from liquidation to pay for operating expenses. It did so through noisily shunning the few museums that did it, whether or not they were AAMD members. Bad publicity doesn’t mortify so much anymore but, still, “we’ve been sanctioned” isn’t news that trustees or donors like to hear.

Last spring, Black Death II hit the marquees. It seems everyone went to see it, leaving no one employed, no tourism, no kids in school, and no one going to museums. AAMD panicked. With its cooler heads in lockdown or, more likely, suppressed by Big Tech’s Big Brother, it opened the spigot.

AAMD decreed that a museum could use money from deaccessioned art in two new ways and for only two years. If it sold, say, a million-dollar painting, it could establish an acquisitions endowment and use the income for operating expenses of any kind for a period of two years, after which the income would be required to go to acquisitions. Or it could sell that painting for a million and use it all for “direct care of collections,” provided that the museum’s trustees had a policy, made public, that defined “direct care of collections.”

As I imagined, museums tried to sell art for all kinds of expenses, starting with a 16-wheeler to drive through the loopholes in AAMD’s tweak. “Direct care of collections” means nearly anything and everything. It could mean art conservation, but it also could mean utilities servicing the vaults and galleries, security, insurance, and salaries. Even if trustees have a policy defining it, money is fungible. Conniving directors and eager-to-please bean counters will find a way to ooze collection-care money into budget offsets.

The Baltimore Museum of Art proposed to sell $65 million in art to fund acquisitions of art by women and people of color, which is good and permissible under old AAMD rules, and to fund staff raises, a diversity czar, and expanded opening hours. I suspect that a few “diversity hires” would have happened. Part of the money would go into an endowment while part was available for instant burning.

A furor followed Baltimore’s announcement. Among the three paintings the museum wanted to sell is a big, splashy, late, middling, but, I agree, important Andy Warhol painting. Past heads of AAMD opposed Baltimore’s plan, as did some of the museum’s trustees and big donors.

Hours before the art went on the block at Sotheby’s, the museum caved. A frantic AAMD board tweaked its tweak. For a museum to use its art-for-cash scheme, it had to be in financial extremis, and the Baltimore museum wasn’t. Museums can’t go for a diversity, equity, and inclusion crusade using cash from art sales.

The Baltimore museum claimed it had AAMD’s clearance before announcing its plan to sell art. Someone might have given it a wink and a nod, but I think a signal of that kind was a distortion of what AAMD hoped to accomplish. Now, art for cash is available only to keep a museum from the kind of destitution that would lead it to close or to scrimp on essential collection care (such as paying for heat).

If nothing else, the Baltimore museum’s disaster shows how obsessed many in the museum world are with the equity rainbow. It also shows how quickly even museums like Baltimore, a place of scholarly and historic significance, can sink to art raids when a big pot of cash seems there for the taking.

A few years ago, the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) changed its code of ethics to allow the sale of art for “the direct care of collections.” The AAM, with 4,000 members, is the all-purpose museum association. It includes art museums, gardens, historical societies, zoos, and children’s museums, among other genres. Unlike AAMD, the AAM defined the term. Money from the sale of cultural assets can be used to “invest in the existing collections by enhancing their life, usefulness, or quality, and thereby ensuring that they will continue to benefit the public.”

With AAMD’s temporary window a year old, with a year to go, some members, led by MoMA, the Met, and a few others, want to make it permanent and to clarify what “collection care” is. They tried last week to test members’ sentiments. On the one hand, COVID lockdowns and our trashed economy continue to deplete museum finances. On the other, the Baltimore fiasco is fresh. If I am allowed a third hand, members with unimpaired memories know that AAMD has opposed any form of art-for-cash plunder, thunderously and for years.

The poll was on whether or not AAMD should work via a subcommittee to develop a policy permanently permitting the use of funds from the sale of art for collection care, including a uniform definition of “collection care.”

The camel’s snout nearly got under the tent. My sense is that this is Round One. Sooner or later, the camel will get to move in and raid the liquor cabinet.

As noted above, the vote was close, 88–91, leaving things as is, for now. So there won’t be a new subcommittee working on a plan to make the art-for-cash scheme permanent. This suggests that the COVID emergency rule will expire next year.

This is a poll, however, not a binding vote. AAMD meets formally in May. Its 21-member board will meet beforehand. It can recommend the establishment of a subcommittee, and the membership can vote again. Last week, 42 members were absent from the Zoom session. Clearly, there’s profound division on the issue.

I grimaced when I saw that AAM’s definition of “direct care of collections” is 13 pages long. “Is it that complicated?” I thought. It is, in part because botanical gardens have rare plants, zoos have nearly extinct animals, house museums own houses that are architecturally significant, and then there are dinosaurs. Each has its own nuance.

For all its length and all the nuances in AAM’s community, the definition of “direct care of collections” is vague. I’d say that conservation definitely qualifies. If AAMD ever adopts AAM’s standard, art sales can fund entire museum-conservation departments. For big places like the Met, the Getty, the Art Institute, and MoMA, these are multi-million-dollar expenses. Better security? Gallery lighting? Enhanced climate control? All seem to qualify. I imagine that some museums would try to smuggle money from art sales into capital spending for state-of-the-art storage.

I’m thinking that AAMD will make the COVID-caused raid-the-vault scheme permanent. A few years ago, a proposal allowing the liquidation of art for budget-balancing cash would have gotten zero votes. A director promoting it would have been pelted with garbage.

Last year, AAMD allowed these sales in a panic. Now, as much as Dr. Quack and his army of public-health mediocrities and panic-porn addicts will try to keep the COVID crisis going with advice to double- and even triple-mask, and through gossip about mysterious “new strains,” the lockdown debacle is coming to a close. The hysteria-hustler Fauci dreamt of a multiyear run of Black Death II, starring, of course, him. That dream’s fading, and even he knows it. A few weeks ago, he crawled out of the D.C. Swamp to give his Play-Doh model of the coronavirus to the Smithsonian.

Though only one or two chronically desperate museums have used it, 88 members want the crack dispenser to stay. Cue “Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets.” Hapless Jo from Hannibal, Mo., had willpower when tempted. Museum directors? Maybe not so much.

The Met and the MoMA will keep agitating for it. Desperate for cash, enough directors will cave. “I’ve sinned,” they’ll tell their confessors. “Please, God, make me good . . . but not yet.” Then they’ll tap dance to the art vault, with Christie’s and Sotheby’s on speed dial, whistling “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

That is, unless an embarrassed, even mortified Met board pulls the rug from under its hired help. The trustees don’t want to see museums everywhere undermined because their million-dollar-a-year head honchos can’t cut costs. They take seriously their role as leaders of the American museum community

That the Met is leading the art-for-cash pack astonishes me. Its director, Max Hollein, and president, Dan Weiss, don’t want to balance the Met budget the old-fashioned way, like raising what they spend, or they can’t do it. So they want to raid the vaults. They want to sell art to solve their overspending problem.

I’ve been skeptical of this pair for a while. Hollein is Austrian, and I have nothing against Austrians, but he looks and sounds like an EU bureaucrat. Weiss used to be a college president. College presidents were once to be revered. Nowadays, I’d say they’ve lost their way. Does that combination seem promising?

There’s too much drama coming from the Met. It’s doing too many weird things, such as the guitar show, fashion and Catholicism, a lousy show on Thomas Cole as tree-hugger, and an anniversary show that was as apologetic as it was celebratory. The big Monkman paintings in the Grand Hall are PC crap, and the Met paid good money for them. The new British galleries and European-paintings wing have many odd moments.

Last year, charges of racism and misogyny convulsed museums in America. The Met, though, unlike the Guggenheim and MoMA, never experienced a staff revolt. Its leaders panicked as if they did. It’s now got a high-paid diversity czar.

I watched Weiss and Hollein grab the mics on January 6, the day that guy with the moose-antler hat tried to overthrow the government, allegedly. Weiss and Hollein cried “treason” and “domestic terrorism” in a long, in-person statement that I found inappropriate and opportunistic. We mere mortals don’t know what happened on January 6. The truth’s been spun, befogged, warped, and buried. Weiss and Hollein sounded a bit berko. They’re art historians, and they work for the Met. Why not wait for clarity, I thought, or, better still, stick to their day jobs?

And after years of budget cuts, layoffs, furloughs, and buyouts, as well as a new, hefty $25 admission charge, the Met’s books still aren’t balanced.

And then there’s the disingenuous spin. The Met is saying it “might” have a $150 million deficit because of the lockdown catastrophe. That’s like saying Martians “might” land on the Met’s roof garden. The Met’s budget is $300 million. A $150 million deficit means a hole that’s 50 percent of the spending doughnut. Not even Washington has done that.

It’s atrocity propaganda. Echo chambers in the art press keep repeating it. The Met’s deficit last year, with months of no admissions income, was $7 million. It had a record fundraising year. It’s got a $3 billion endowment.

So a new class of Raiders of the Packed Vaults is on the horizon. Trustees will pressure directors to sell art so their own giving burden is reduced. Potential and even longstanding donors will think “why give?” — either disgusted at the art sales or believing that their gifts to needy charities with no assets to hawk will truly make a difference. Donors of art will think twice about giving their collections.

AAMD and the directors pushing a permanent art-for-cash grab are putting curators in peril, too. Even now, when AAMD is permitting the sale of art to ease financial hardships caused by the COVID hysteria and lockdowns, curators are feeling heat from directors and bean counters to scour storage. “Pony up,” they hint, “or bad things might happen.” Will they wake up, speaking of ponies, with severed horse heads in their beds? Who knows? Money makes people do strange things.

The most vulnerable museums are those belonging to colleges and universities.

They’re ruled by trustees who might never visit, or barely know that the campus has a museum. College presidents might not care about art. If there’s a choice between the dusty old Duccio and a new gym, which do you think will win the day? The Met and the other well-heeled boosters of art-for-cash raids are putting these museums before the firing squad.

I don’t believe that trustees necessarily should give more. Anne Pasternak, the very good director of the Brooklyn Museum, made a good point in an interview last week. It should be obvious. “Why is it the trustees’ responsibility to pay 100 percent of the expenses of public institutions?” she asked of the multitudes who say trustees should simply give more. “Boards aren’t filled with billionaires.” I’ll add that rich people get hit for money every day of the week. They can’t say “yes” to every ask.

It’s the directors who need to balance their budgets. That means keeping staffs small and entrepreneurial and raising money. The stock market is strong. In the past year, millions of Americans have gotten poorer. The rich are richer. Fundraising shouldn’t be impossible. I think a scrappy director will need to find some new lines, but the money’s there for the old-fashioned asking.

Once museums get a few snorts of art-for-cash, they’ll be hooked. It’s a drug trip with no happy ending.