The Getty Museum’s Good Citizenship and Groundbreaking L.A. Art

Burned by a scandal over stolen antiquities, the Getty now leads the way in transparency and philanthropy.

L ast year, I wrote about Getty staff’s tantrums after the Floyd murder in Minneapolis. An entitled, surly, ungrateful, and, I suspect, large part of the Getty staff badgered the Getty’s top brass to endorse and then to celebrate the Black Lives Matter racket. The Getty’s leadership wisely declined at first, understanding that BLM is not a mantra but a brand, an organization, and a fundraising machine about which we still know very little. The Getty, as a nonprofit, mustn’t get involved in politics. The death of the fentanyl addict and violent ex-con Floyd, however filmed and gruesome, was a matter for the courts, it correctly believed.

Too many on the staff also complained the Getty doesn’t do enough for the community, which is rich given that it’s a free museum and spends tens of millions of dollars on programs for the locals.

The Getty’s trustees — almost all rich academics, rich and high-ranking education bureaucrats, and rich corporate titans — pulled the rug out from under the Getty’s president and took the knee. Talk’s cheap, they surely believed. The Getty, of all places, gave BLM a big, sloppy kiss. Once dirtied by politics, it’s hard to stay clean and to stay out.

We know that the head of BLM has since gone on a multi-million-dollar personal spending spree, snapping up a walled estate in Topanga Canyon, not too far from her new besties at the Getty. Did the beacon lights of virtue on its staff insist that the Getty send a housewarming present? BLM is a financial labyrinth. Its affiliates bitterly complain that the $90 million hauled in by the BLM corporate suite, mostly from other corporate suites paying protection money, has stayed put, in the dark. BLM continues to push a snide anti-Semitic agenda and advocates emptying jails, gutting police departments, and socializing the economy, which, we can assume, includes foundations like the Getty.

The Getty staff also made a big, noisy push for fairness on the pay front. That the Getty underpays its junior and support staff is no secret. It’s run by people who come from Yale, Harvard, and other places where a have-and have-not labor system is entrenched. As a truly huge organization, the Getty is glacial in making changes. The staff rebelled against loosey-goosey protocols for pay raises, promotions, evaluations, and recruitment.

The Getty is now addressing this. I read its plan to implement a fair pay-and-promotion system. It’s very good and the right thing to do. The Getty staff, I’m told, has made no effort to unionize. I hope the Getty isn’t bullied into a system of racial quotas in hiring. Its diversity, equity, and inclusion plan tosses fake terms such as “systemic racism” and “anti-racism” as if they’re clinical rather than ideological. “Anti-racism” is the admission that race explains everything. “Systemic racism” is a state of being in which one sees racism everywhere. Both are false values. We live in the most successfully multiethnic and multiracial culture in the history of the world.

I hope the Getty’s willy-nilly terms are rhetorical. I hope the Getty doesn’t create a big staff devoted to equity-and-diversity orthodoxy. These new departments are poison. They thrive through strife — so look for it and subtly exacerbate it. They grow and grow, Leviathan-like, too, eating money best spent on programs serving the public.

The Getty’s biggest problem is that it has too much money. This has softened and soured the staff, which seems to have turned bratty. I read the biographies of the Getty’s trustees. Most sit on too many boards. It’s impossible, given the commitment of time and energy it takes to oversee a huge place like the Getty, to oversee three, four, or five other charities. For all practical purposes, the Getty is a major university. It probably should be split up.

The Getty is often dissed as sitting atop a hill, remote from the rest of the world like the gods on Olympus. First of all, it’s not much of a hill. Second, the Getty is deeply involved in Los Angeles and also in all of Southern California. I don’t think there is a cultural institution that does more for its neighbors. It has an $11 billion endowment generating a boatload of cash that goes not only to buying art, though that expenditure is big and gets the most headlines. The Getty Trust is a foundation that distributes grants to support culture. It’s got more money than the Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation, both of which go on lots of pop ideological toots, and its spending has a far greater impact on people.

I became aware of the Getty’s good citizenship when it paid for the Pacific Standard Time initiative starting in 2011. It enlisted 60 cultural organizations in Southern California to mount exhibitions on Southern California art from 1945 to 1980. To say this was seminal work is an understatement. The initiative put the art of Southern California on the map. It’s a rich, complex field and mostly ignored in art history, which is run from East Coast and European museums and universities. Another iteration in 2017 focused on Hispanic art in Southern California and was, once again, revelatory. The next Pacific Standard Time project is on art and science, again showcasing local artists.

I think this is among the most daunting, daring, and successful collaborations in American culture. The Getty not only led the charge. It conceptualized it as broad-based, benefitting millions, and helped develop a notion that culture in the region isn’t just movies and bikini fashion.

The Getty’s got a new project supporting historic preservation in African-American neighborhoods in Los Angeles. It pays for 150,000 kids from the Los Angeles public schools to come to the museum and pays on-site teachers to serve them. The Getty spent millions on COVID-relief programs for artists. The Getty Research Center has bought dozens of archives of California architects. It has paid for endless art- and architecture-conservation projects in Southern California.

These are a few examples of what the Getty’s doing locally. It’s an international, scholarly place, and that’s its primary focus, as it should be. Its primary mission isn’t social work. The amorphous cause called “social justice” isn’t its mission at all and shouldn’t be. Getty staffers who want otherwise should look for jobs in focused advocacy groups, say, for the homeless in Los Angeles, or they could teach in an inner-city school or go into the unicorn-chasing business on their own dime.

All of the Getty’s big exhibitions are provocative and on point in addition to beautifully done. Its scholarly catalogues are the gold standard. It has been among the biggest factors in making Southern California so culturally rich. This region has a distinct culture, and the Getty has encouraged its discovery and enhancement rather than trying to graft East Coast culture onto it. All of this is within the Getty’s mission, and it does a superb job.

The Getty learned an enormous amount from the Getty antiquities scandal. In a nutshell, from the mid 1970s until the late 1990s, the Getty seems to have been deeply involved in antiquities smuggling rings operating in Italy and Greece and, for part of this period, a tax-evasion scheme. The museum bought and accepted as gifts a vast array of antiquities that it knew, or should have known, were illegally exported. There is much evidence the Getty’s curators connived with donors to inflate the value of charitable gifts. Getty brass, including the museum’s director and deputy director, the Getty’s lawyers, and the president of the Getty Trust, must have known what was happening or, if they didn’t, looked the other way in the face of the obvious.

By 2005, the Getty had tagged 30 of what it called its top 100 ancient masterpieces as having dubious provenance. It conceded that hundreds of others might have been looted. It returned the polychrome marble Two Griffins Attacking a Fallen Doe, from 325 b.c., which it got as a dodgy gift from Larry Fleischman, and a towering sculpture of Aphrodite from around 450 b.c. for which is paid $18 million.

The Getty scandal is worth revisiting as a study in hubris, the Greek concept of arrogance and overconfidence, of unyielding ambition, of trying to usurp powers and privileges reserved only to the gods. The cocky spinner Arachne boasted she could beat Athena in a contest to weave the finest tapestry. True, hers was judged the best, but you never challenge the gods. Athena turned her into a spider. Icarus, trying to fly with wings fixed to his body with wax, ignored warnings to stay far from the sun. He wanted to fly as high as the gods and trespass on the realm of fire, light, and heat. Tantalus abused the gods’ hospitality. Welcomed to dine with them, he both stole from them and tricked them. He thought he was smarter than the gods. He’s doomed to Hades forever, placed in a pool beneath a fruit tree. Whenever Tantalus reaches for fruit to eat, the branches rise out of reach. Whenever he reaches for a drink of water, the pool drains.

Hubris is believing you’re in total control, immune from the laws of nature and even the tenets of reality. General Custer said, “Where did all those damned Indians come from?” The Getty knew what the law said. It thought it was untouchable. It thought the rules applied only to the little people, not to them.

The Getty wanted to build the finest antiquities collection in America, but it started very late. The Met and the MFA in Boston had been collecting for more than a hundred years. Like Icarus, the Getty tried to touch the sun. It got zapped. They might not have known which documents were forged, where looted objects were found, and how they went from a hole in southern Italy to Switzerland, a good spiffing up, a crooked dealer’s inventory, and then on approval to the Getty. They knew, though, that some of their prize acquisitions were hot.

The Getty returned, no refunds allowed, $40 million in looted art that it had bought with tax-exempt, not-for-profit money meant to be used for the good of the public. It spent millions more, all meant for the public’s benefit, on high-priced lawyers defending the Getty in criminal prosecutions and tax audits.

The scandal was very public and traumatic, and by no means was the Getty alone in aiding and abetting piracy. In a case of good citizenship aborning, the Getty came clean, also in a very public and traumatic way and, by its example, ended the conceit with which museums like the Met have conducted their antiquities collecting for years. For this, in the museum world, the Getty was something of a skunk in the garden party. By coming clean, and pushing for more transparency and tougher standards for evaluating the antiquities offered to the museum, the Getty transformed the antiquities market.

The rules developed through the leadership of the Getty are now very tight, so tight that acquiring the best antiquities for American museum collections — things of the quality of the Getty Bronze or its Aphrodite — is impossible. When great things are indeed excavated now, they stay in Italy or Greece, which have hundreds of thousands of antiquities unseen in vaults. I think they’re too tight. The Italians, for instance, have a Mussolini-era law prohibiting the export of all antiquities. This is extreme and a nationalist excess. By banning everything, it invites a black market since governments can’t ban desire and it can’t ban rich people from pursuing their desires.

As the antiquities scandal unfolded, archaeologists ferociously opposed collecting via the black market. Looters might be purposeful, even methodical, but they’re diggin’ for dollars. They don’t care about history or science or anthropology. They don’t care about the integrity of dig sites, and they destroy evidence as they look for objects they can sell. Art conservationists feel the same way. Buried antiquities often are trashed in illegal excavations, often led by people with training no better than what a grave digger or pipe layer gets. Archaeologists, curators will say, don’t care about antiquities as art. Rather, they’re artifacts that might very well be art but mostly tell stories about how people in antiquity lived. For archaeologists, often a shard is more revealing than an intact bronze.

The Getty basically threw its lot in with the archaeologists. It’s now a leader in international preservation and study. The Getty also developed an entirely new way of introducing great antiquities new to the American public — it borrows things from the Italians mostly, keeping them as long-term loans. This is problematic since extortion is a big part of the Italian way of doing business. The Getty and Italy are in the middle of an ongoing dispute over the Getty Bronze — the Italian claim that this sculpture was found in Italian, not international, waters is unprovable. The dispute is probably the reason that the Torlonia collection of Roman sculpture, about which I wrote in June, isn’t coming to the Getty.

The Getty was criticized for throwing antiquities curator Marion True under the bus while museum director John Walsh and deputy director Deborah Gribbon, who was True’s supervisor, escaped the terrible pall of bad publicity. Walsh retired. Gribbon left under a cloud unrelated to the antiquities scandal and with a $3 million parting bonus. This is appalling. I don’t think nonprofits should pay people to go, as much as I like Gribbon.

True had to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to know that the things she proposed for Getty purchase were hot. Up the ladder were Gribbon and Walsh, the Getty’s legal department, Harold Williams, who was the Getty president and, I think a very fine man, Barry Munitz, his successor, who I think was a very bad man, and then the Getty trustees. Williams and the board had no knowledge of how the antiquities market operated. Walsh and Gribbon did. Munitz instinctively might have known. It takes a rat to smell a rat. The board seldom asked pointed questions, but I doubt the trustees even knew what questions to ask.

True was the only Getty staffer indicted for complicity in smuggling, and that was by Italian prosecutors. The Getty paid her legal bills until all the litigation, including the criminal charges in Italy, ended. True was indeed very involved in promoting cleaner, clearer acquisition standards and was among the few antiquities curators seeming to challenge a status quo at the center of which were illegal digs and smuggling. If she had a mantra, though, it was more like “Lord, make me good . . . but not yet.” She must be an Episcopalian. True’s fingerprints were all over hundreds of smuggled objects and misleading records. She advocated reform, yes, but at the same time she engineered shady purchases that skirted Italian law, U.N. conventions, and her own reform proposals.

Her downfall stemmed not from her indictment in Italy for trafficking in stolen goods or even the bad press the Getty got for buying art the Italians claimed was stolen. She was fired for accepting a $400,000 loan from an antiquities dealer and, later, from Larry Fleischman, which allowed her to buy a home in Paros, the Greek island that produced much of the best marble for ancient Greek sculpture and buildings. She was doing business with the dealer and negotiating a huge partial purchase, partial gift to the Getty of Fleischman’s antiquities collection. This is a conflict of interest and deeply unethical. Fleischman’s collection was rife with provenance problems.

Again, to the Getty’s credit, it opened its archives, though after the fact, to the two Los Angeles Times investigative reporters who broke the story about plunder entering the Getty collection. The Getty also authorized its lawyers and staff to speak to them openly and truthfully. Only Walsh, Gribbon, and True refused to be interviewed.

The Getty, in the bad old days of its antiquities collection, was plagued by hubris. Humility, circumspection, probity, and restraint scatter in the face of hubris. True and her Getty betters wanted an antiquities collection for their new museum that would rival the collections of East Coast museums who’d started their buying a hundred years earlier when standards were looser or nonexistent. The Getty had the millions to do it. Its desires collided with a new climate, especially in Italy, where laws against smuggling were strictly enforced.

True is an example of a curator of great aptitude but modest means who flew in a flock of very rich and very shady people. She wanted to live like the very rich and have a pad in Paros. She wanted her collection at the Getty to be the very best and to get the credit for it. To do all of this, she had to be very shady herself.

Having been badly burned, the Getty is now scrupulous in its adherence to the laws of other countries. Munitz was canned in 2006 in a separate scandal involving abuses of his expense account. Since then, the Getty Trust has been ruled by Jim Wood, the retired director of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Jim Cuno, who came to the Getty when Wood died. Cuno himself led the Art Institute. Wood was a total straight shooter and a man of honor and integrity — and Cuno is as well. They hired the very best people, too.

Before Wood arrived, the Getty was ruled in large part by a Los Angeles, even Wild West, ethos. Find what you want and take it, no matter how roughshod the ride. It’s a sleazy Hollywood way of doing business, too. I think the antiquities scandal chastened the Getty, and Wood’s and Cuno’s rule acculturated it to the high standards we expect from a world-class steward of high culture. The Getty’s engagement in Los Angeles and its philanthropy, both substantial and impeccable, stem from their leadership.