Shame on the Met’s Trustees

One of the richest museums in the world sells art to pay the bills.

S o the Met has succumbed to the sweet songs of the Sirens. It’s selling art to balance its budget. It’s starting with a sale of about a million dollars in art over the next few weeks. It’ll surely consign more. The Met has done its fair share of grave robbing, having returned over the past few years millions of dollars in antiquities it bought illegally. Now it’s into robbing art vaults, and its own at that.

The Met’s top brass needs to brush up on its Homer. It needs to read The Odyssey to learn something about fighting temptation. In The Odyssey, the Sirens, dangerous creatures who combined the look of women and birds, hid among cliffs and crags by the ocean. They sang so beautifully to music so divine that sailors would draw their ships close to the rocks for a listen, too close, too often as the Sirens peddled not music but death. Ships became shipwrecks, sailors soggy corpses. On their voyage-turned–obstacle course, Odysseus and his crew got lost and skirted the Sirens’ home. He ordered the crew to plug their ears with beeswax and row as if their lives depended on it, which they did.

Odysseus, though, wanted to know what was so enchanting about their music and their songs. The crew tied him to a mast so he could listen, and listen he did. Well, they were better than Donna Summer moaning “Love to Love You Baby.”

The crew couldn’t hear Odysseus but were adept enough in lipreading to understand their bewitched leader’s screams of “Closer, closer” and “Untie the rope!” They tightened it instead and rowed more furiously. Odysseus knew himself, and he knew the Sirens. If he was too addled to resist temptation, at least he had the foresight to plan against it. Another brush with death averted.

Craven and grasping, the Met’s leaders are no Odysseus. Temptation? The Pistol Annies sang “I Feel a Sin Comin’ On.” Is the Met after “tall, dark, and handsome, mix it up with somethin’ strong?” Nahhhh. Stacks of Bennies set their hearts aflutter and brains inert.

Hearing tunes like “Money, Money, Money,” since Cabaret never goes out of style, the Met is selling photographs and prints at three Christie’s auctions over the next six weeks, the first starting September 24. It’s using a loophole to do something that would have been considered ghastly a couple of years ago. It’s using the money to balance its budget.

In the spring of 2020, during the early chaos surrounding the Chinese coronavirus, opportunist pols, the hysterics press, and lifer public-health zilches like the NIH’s Dr. Quack told us we’d all die. The economy crashed. No one went anywhere.

Museums shut. For many museums, no visitors, no money.

The Association of Art Museum Directors, the museum world’s keeper of standards, relaxed its rule absolutely forbidding the sale of art to pay for operating expenses. It approved for two years only the sale of art to cover what it called “collection care.”

This is sleazy, porous marketing talk. Most museums sell art from their permanent collections. They sell junk, duplicates, or objects that no longer fit the mission. They use the money to buy more art. So what’s the big deal? If museums can sell art to buy art, why not sell art to nurse the art you have? “Collection care,” alas, means everything and anything. It means curatorial salaries. They care for the collection, after all. It means the utility bills. Have to heat and cool the galleries and the vaults. “Collection care” means budget offsets.

AAMD changed its rules in a panic. When it voted at its spring 2020 meeting, the stock market had just tanked. Admission and event revenue has evaporated. There’s always been a narrow but powerful constituency among museum directors for monetizing their collections. Museums such as MoMA and SF MoMA own racks of Warhols, Rothkos, de Koonings, and Lichtensteins. Picasso was prolific and a genius, but, let’s face it, he had lots of bad days. Post-siesta Picassos — bright, obvious, loud, and ugly — are marketable, as are Renoir’s fat women and Matisse’s happy, vapid cutouts. Art like this makes big, big bucks. Selling these for budget relief wouldn’t kill anyone, I heard, sub rosa, when I was a museum director.

Suddenly, in 2020, whispers in favor of art-for-cash schemes turned into Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis,” frenzied and rule-smashing. Museums everywhere wanted money.

As sloppy as AAMD’s new rule is, being born of a rattled, anxious moment, it’s clear who it’s intended to help, and it’s not the museums that house big modern and contemporary collections with hot brand names. It’s intended to help places such as the Newark Museum and the Brooklyn Museum that are chronically broke for many reasons they can barely control. They have no backup cash, a modest donor base upon which many community demands are made, old, big buildings to maintain, and staffs already at barebones levels after years of cuts. It’s intended to help smaller museums that were, anecdotally, driven to the brink of insolvency because of the COVID crash.

After a year and a half of COVID madness, no museum has actually been driven to the brink of insolvency. Very few have sold art for cash. Most weathered the storm without raiding the vault. They made cuts. They lived within new, constrained means. Most, including the Met, paid lots of people six-figure salaries during months of lockdown, and many got paid for doing little or nothing. A museum librarian doesn’t have much on his or her plate if the library’s shut. A conservator tends to be idled without access to art. That so many high-priced museum people got paid for doing so little for so long doesn’t sound like impoverishment to me.

The Met is now the world’s artsiest welfare queen. Instead of doing the hard work of living within new means and raising money the old-fashioned way, it’s looking in its vault for free money. Once a museum starts counting on an art-for-cash program to balance its budget, it won’t stop.

This rule change is not intended to benefit the Met. The Met’s not broke. According to the Met’s last annual report, covering the fiscal year ending June 30, 2020, and its 2019 tax return, its endowment was, then, about $3.7 billion. It’s the second-richest museum in the country, and the richest if we look at the Getty, with $11 billion, as a foundation supporting many things, among them a museum. I asked the Met’s PR office for a ballpark current endowment and got no response. I’d say their philosophy is “silence is golden” but fear that using a word like “golden” would cause the Met’s masters to salivate. “Can we monetize it?” they’ll think.

Given the run-up in the stock market, it’s safe to say the Met’s endowment is over $4 billion. Some, I know, is restricted acquisitions money. It’s also safe to say the Met’s loaded. It’s the premiere philanthropy in New York, the richest city in America, with thousands of donors, many millionaires, and more than a few billionaires. It has a fundraising machine. It is certainly worthy but is not among the needy by any conceivable conception of the term “poor.”

The Met has happily acquiesced to a lazy, gullible art press repeating the canard that it has a $150 million deficit or, alternately, an amorphous $150 million “revenue loss.” It has peddled the number. It didn’t come from nowhere. The Met’s deficit for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2020, was $7.7 million, with a budget of $287 million. Since then, it’s made many budget reductions, cutting what it calls its “head count” by 15 percent.

I suspect, given the stock market’s boom and what I hear from museum people who still talk to me, that the Met’s annual fund has been strong. The COVID mass hysteria has made the rich richer and the poor poorer.

I know the Met lost admissions revenue but, alas, black swans happen. COVID is a bit of poultry like no other. I suspect that the Met had a deficit for the fiscal year that ended this past June. It’s probably $10 million. It also did no pricey exhibitions. It was closed for a chunk of the year and is showing only its permanent collection for the rest. If it has a deficit, it only means it didn’t cut enough expenses at a time when its programming was comatose. With its massive donor base, and with the market gains it has experienced, and with $4 billion in the bank, the last thing it should be doing is selling art. It’s a solution only lazy, craven people would have fashioned.

The Met hasn’t publicized the consignment of art to Christie’s, as if it’s a bystander. It left it to Christie’s to announce it, and its press release is another doozy. On September 17, a week before the first art-for-cash sale, Christie’s announced “it has been entrusted” to sell Met prints and photographs in line with the new AAMD’s policy “that enables institutions to direct fund from deaccession sales toward collection care for a limited time in consideration of revenue losses resulting from the ongoing pandemic.”

Three Christie’s big shots are quoted, a sure sign everyone knows this is a pile of stink in need of a massive scenting operation. The head of Christie’s said, “We treasure our relationship with the museums that have been so profoundly affected by the pandemic, and yet continued to engage the public both in person and digitally while the doors were closed.” The heads of Christie’s prints and photography departments say the sales “present a unique opportunity to support the museum” and “are destined to enhance print collections worldwide.”

The press release is illustrated with a Robert Frank photograph depicting an American FLAG, as if we’re treated to a supreme flower of patriotism. “Entrusted,” “honored,” “treasure,” and “enhance print collections worldwide.”

I’m hearing “God Save the Queen,” sung by Mother Teresa at the opening of the United Nations. I’m also hearing a refrain of “Money, Money, Money.”

And, by the way, the auction house tells us, the art the Met is selling is damn good.

The Met thinks it’ll make about $1 million. The estimate is $900,000 to $1.5 million. This press send-up is both subtle and sleazy. The dollar amount is small so, as potatoes go, it’s mere Frito Lay and not gratin dauphinois. And it’s mostly prints, so no one cares. There’s some Civil War photography. “Civil War, you say. . . . That’s got to be racist.” The artists mentioned in the Christie’s release are all dead white men.

The Met, of course, is preparing its next raid on the art vault, which will be, I hear, a $5 million grab and will involve paintings, some by artists not exactly well known but with some commercial value. Depending on how the Christie’s sale goes, mostly on how much squawking there is since the Met is basically concerned with how it looks, the next tranche will happen before the end of the year. The curators are already picking the art. The Met’s doing a small grab now, but it’s still breaking precedent, aside from assaulting the sanctity of art. For its next, bigger heist, the Met’ll say “old news.” Will the art press let itself be played? I hope not.

It’s clear the Met plans to solve its deficit through its cash-for-art scheme.

It’s also clear the Met, America’s greatest museum and a leader in best museum practices, doesn’t care about the example it’s setting. Trustees of dozens of genuinely strapped museums are pressuring directors and curators to sell art to balance the budgets, alleviating their own obligations to give. Lots of directors are pressuring curators to cough up art to sell, alleviating their own fundraising burdens. “Well, if the Met’s doing it, why can’t we?” The Met’s flipping these brave, principled people the board. The gold standard of museum behavior is turned into the museum world’s newest gold digger.

Christie’s press release correctly notes that, as it stands now, art-for-cash grabs are a limited-time-only proposition. The AAMD rule change is set to expire in April. This doesn’t mean it’ll actually expire. Earlier this year, AAMD took a straw vote on whether or not it should form a committee to develop detailed guidelines governing a permanent rule allowing art to be sold for operating expenses. This was only a nonbinding finger in the wind and was by Zoom with 42 of AAMD’s 221 members missing the vote. The move to establish a committee, proxy for making the art-for-cash scheme permanent, failed by a vote of 88 to 91.

After this 88–91 vote, making art-for-cash a permanent policy will surely come back, with a boost from the Met. Among the 91 who believe that art collections aren’t ATMs, some will face more pressure from trustees. Now that the Met’s gone greedy, I think selling art for budget relief will get a green light at the next AAMD meeting in January. Max Hollein, the director of the Met, doesn’t have the same clout or credibility as Philippe de Montebello, but the Met’s thumb on the scale makes a difference. COVID is becoming the permanent crisis that justifies everything and anything.

That a move of this kind would get 88 votes, or even eight votes, or any kind of vote would have been unthinkable, even surreal, a few years ago. This shows how grasping the museum world has become. Like colleges and universities, like so much of our social, political, and cultural elite, they’ll do anything for a buck.

Did the Met’s trustees approve this? If they did, they should be ashamed of themselves.