Insight into Baltimore Museum Brouhaha as Director Decamps

No one seems to have gotten a straight story in the rush to utopia.

I’ ve written the last couple of weeks about the art scene in London. Before I jump to what’s happening in Paris, I’ll cover news back on the ranch. A few American stories are worth reporting. So, from London and Paris to Baltimore and Portland — Portland in Maine, that is, not Portland, Antifa’s capital.

The Covid mass hysteria, now downgraded to a hypnosis bewitching neurotics and power freaks, counts among its casualties such virtues as restraint and probity. The exit of Christopher Bedford as director of the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) hits the spotlight for one last moment on one of the biggest art scandals of the Covid era. He’s going to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) as director. I like Chris Bedford, a charismatic and dynamic leader, and wish him well.

The scandal’s worth revisiting. I’ve written many times about museum trustees. The board, in effect, owns the museum. It has a fiduciary duty to steward the place wisely and well. The director, as the hired help, has a duty — not a fiduciary one but a contractual, professional, or moral one — to deal with the board in good faith. Trustees are obliged to deal with one another in good faith, too.

On October 28, 2020, hours before a Sotheby’s auction, Baltimore’s trustees pulled paintings by Brice Marden, Andy Warhol, and Clyfford Still from the sale. Estimated to fetch $60 million, they were taken from the museum’s superb collection to finance a new endowment, the income from which would pay for higher staff salaries, evening hours, free admission to special exhibitions, buying art by women and people of color, and other “diversity programs.” Bedford, director since 2017, designed and touted the initiative.

All of these are good things, except for the vague “diversity programs,” which, I think, involved funding a two-tier HR department segregating races, creating race-based hiring quotas, and enforcing different staff performance criteria based on race. This is poison. I’m all for everything else, above all paying and promoting people fairly. I think these good things are attractive fundraising vehicles. No museum should sell museum art to finance them, however. You get the money the old-fashioned way: You persuade donors to give it.

I suspect that the “diversity programs” involved hiring a new “diversity, equity, and inclusion” staff or new curators hired by race. A $60 million fund produces a hefty $3 million in revenue. The BMA’s budget last year was $18 million. Bedford sought, in effect, 17 percent more revenue to spend. That’s a lot of moolah. Pay hikes for low-earning staff, evening hours, and free exhibitions cost a pittance. Clearly, the big bucks were going to new seats at the staff table.

The BMA, at Bedford’s urging, sold millions in art in 2018 to create a war chest to buy art by women and people of color. We know the museum got $8 million, since some of the art sold at a Sotheby’s auction. We don’t know how much it got from pictures by Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, which Sotheby’s sold privately. If Bedford had already blown through that money, shame on him and the board.

The plan, supported by the trustees, took advantage of a two-year-only suspension of a ban on selling art to fund anything other than the acquisition of new art. This rule, in effect for years, was promulgated and enforced not by law but by the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), the high-end museum world’s trade association. When the Covid crisis seemed sure to decimate museum budgets from lost admissions and event income and a stock-market collapse, AAMD tweaked the ban to allow the use of money from art sales for operating expenses.

The tweak was meant to ease financial woes caused by the Covid calamity. Bedford and his trustees gamed it by using the money for programmatic initiatives unrelated to Covid. The BMA was not in desperate financial condition. Indeed, like almost all museums, the BMA emerged in good shape from the useless regime of lockdowns and the never-done-before, deliberate crashing of a healthy economy. In laying off frontline staff and doing no exhibitions, most museums saved a bundle. This, and Lockdown Lazies’ preference for the work-from-home routine, explains why museums kept the “Public Not Wanted” signs on their front doors for so long.

Though the trustees approved the sale of the three pictures and the establishment of a new fund, they didn’t anticipate an uproar from donors, among them trustee skeptics and Arnold Lehman, the BMA’s director in the ’80s and ’90s, and also, before long, the wider museum world. The museum didn’t terminate the sale. Rather, it “paused” it, pending the whole scheme’s disappearance into oblivion. A year later, the three paintings are still in Baltimore. Bedford is leaving. The new endowment is, as far as I know, dropped.

Clearly the BMA’s trustees were misled. How and why are good questions. I’ve written a lot about deaccessioning — I’m mostly against it, even when the money goes to buy new art — and trustee accountability. The BMA story is, as we used to say when I was at Phillips Academy, a teachable moment.

When Bedford thought about creating a fund from the sale of art, he surely went to AAMD. He needed its buy-in, or at least its acquiescence. “Can we do this?” he asked either Christine Anagnos, the executive director at AAMD, or Brent Benjamin, then the director of the St. Louis Museum of Art and AAMD’s board chairman.

The conceivable responses would have been these: “Yes, you can,” “I think so,” “Try it . . . you might get away with it,” “I don’t know,” and “No, you can’t.” Since the rules suspension was meant to help museums battered by lockdown-caused revenue losses, I don’t know how the chair of the AAMD board or the executive director could have said “Yes, you can” or “I think so.” That is, unless they’re so blinkered by diversity, equity, and inclusion madness that they were willing to misinterpret their own rules.

If the BMA board were even remotely competent and responsible, it would have asked the director the same question: “Can we do this?” What did he say? If he said, “Let’s try it . . . we might get away with it,” then the board played fast and loose with its responsibility to steward the collection. It was reckless. If the director misrepresented to the board what he heard from AAMD, well, we know what that is. If he fudged, fashioning a wishy-washy “maybe” from AAMD into a hard “yes, we can,” then he not only misled the board. He also exposed it to ridicule and embarrassment, which is what the board got when the plan collapsed.

Mind you, it’s not illegal to sell art to finance these things. On one level, art’s an asset — chattel, like a copy machine, desk, or books in the museum library. The board evidently believed it was in compliance with AAMD’s tweaked rules. It knew that if the sale were not in compliance, the museum would face AAMD sanctions.

Instead, the BMA told the public it was fully in compliance with AAMD standards. If the board knew it was on thin ice in pushing the scheme, then it misled the public and its donors. If the chairwoman of the board, Clair Zamoiski Segal, misled the board, then she needs to go.

Someone was disingenuous, it seems. Who was it? As deeply as Anagnos and Benjamin, both of whom I know and like, might have drunk the diversity, equity, and inclusion Kool-Aid, and I don’t know if that’s the case, I don’t think “you might get away with it” was their answer. They’re too circumspect. If the message Bedford got was “yes you can,” then he was wrong to rely on it. Obviously, the museum wasn’t broke. However squishy AAMD’s new rule is, everyone knew it was for basket cases. No one complained when the Brooklyn Museum sold a pricey Cranach nude for budget relief. The picture is hideous, and the museum is always broke. Covid lockdowns might have pushed it over the edge.

I’m all for calculated risks. Life’s a risky proposition. That said, I would never create a scenario where the board is vulnerable to ridicule, embarrassment, and failure. That’s the fastest way to blow my credibility and the board’s. Bedford pushed through a multi-million-dollar deaccession plan in 2018 amid lots of opposition. Going to the trough again, for far more, for operating expenses and under a rule suspension targeted to help destitute museums was not only too clever by half. It was reckless.

One moral of the story is this: A museum director has many, many constituencies. A tiny, rarefied, and querulous one is his or her predecessors. Arnold Lehman was the BMA’s director many years ago. He went on to become the longtime director of the Brooklyn Museum. When he was the BMA’s director, the museum bought Warhol’s Last Supper, which Bedford tried to sell as part of his $60 million plan. Lehman, whom I also know and admire, considered the acquisition one of his triumphs, and, as director of the Brooklyn Museum, he followed it with many more. It was Lehman, now retired, who developed the furor over Bedford’s and the board’s $60 million money grab.

It’s not that Lehman’s got nothing to do but ruminate. Old museum directors are fussy about their achievements. You don’t want to cross them.

All teachable moments. I don’t think Bedford was pushed out. He’s done many positive things at the BMA. Finding a new director of a big-city museum is not only a royal pain in the patootie but a hellish one, and then there’s so much starting from scratch. A board doesn’t want to wade into the muck voluntarily.

I think Bedford, who’s Scottish, not American, has a Corbynista view of the world. SFMOMA is a better fit. Among his achievements at the BMA are the new Matisse Institute, good exhibitions, and a breath of fresh air. I’m all-in for acquiring art by women and people of color. At the Addison, I focused on both, through gifts of art, fundraising, and targeting young artists.

The one shoe left to drop is Segal, the chairwoman of the BMA board. Her fingerprints are all over this fiasco. Through her bad leadership, she has lost the director, trustees have quit, and noisily, big gifts were withdrawn, more noise still, and the board and museum were pelted with garbage. And she’s a professional fundraising consultant! It was up to her, as the board’s liaison with the director, to vet his plans before they’re presented to the board. If there were any duplicity, she’s part of it.

Last spring, I visited SFMOMA when I was in San Francisco. I didn’t write about it because the place seemed too much in flux. Off the Wall, its new temporary exhibition, had just opened. It displayed flat art that is meant to be displayed in the round but really isn’t sculpture. I liked it, but a few of the permanent-collection galleries were closed for reinstallation. The museum was also in the middle of installing Diego Rivera’s Pan American Unity, the 74-foot-wide wall mural from 1940 that City College of San Francisco needed to unload. I decided to write about the museum on my next visit. It’s a great place, though, like everything else in San Francisco, wracked by woe and whining.

In other San Francisco news, three years ago I wrote about the San Francisco school board’s decision to vandalize murals painted in 1936 at George Washington High School because . . . drumbeat . . . Washington owned slaves. The board wanted to destroy them — the fresco version of book-burning — despite their high quality, the opposition of alumni, parents, and students, and their integration into the building’s original architecture program. The murals are still there, since a judge prohibited their destruction.

This past week, the three school-board members leading this unconscionable, crypto-fascist assault on art were ousted by the voters in a recall election. These three kooks — board chairwoman Gabriela López, Faauuga Moliga, and Alison Collins — counted as their top priorities the abusive masking of children, keeping schools closed, and renaming schools, along with destroying art. Reading, writing, and algebra? Totems of whiteness.

Don’t let the door hit you in your sitzfleisch.

A final bit of good news. AAMD held its winter meeting January 24–27. The group killed by silence a considerable effort to make permanent its two-year suspension of its rule barring art-for-cash raids of the kind tried by the BMA and actually done by the Met, a museum flush with a $4 billion endowment. Last year, AAMD voted 101–97 against a proposal to set up a subcommittee to develop a permanent rule allowing the sale of art for operating expenses.

I incorrectly predicted that the close vote would empower money-grabbing directors to push the point at AAMD’s winter meeting. Some directors, and the Met’s director and president are among them, will do or say anything for a buck. Like the BMA, the Met abused the temporary AAMD rule tweak designed for museums impoverished by the lockdowns. It’s hard to cry poor with $4 billion, but if Glenda Jackson can play King Lear, the Met can play Little Orphan Annie.

I’m glad to have been wrong. AAMD seems to have no stomach for art-vault robbery. On April 30, the window to sell art for operating expenses expires. It’s another sign that the Covid mass psychosis is ending.