Fauci’s Out, His Portrait’s Still In, Fake Basquiats, and a Billion-Dollar Auction Looms at Christie’s

Monthly art-news recap shows that summer can be busy.

A t the end of each month, I’ll write a reprise of recent art news. Some of it won’t be fresh meat exactly, but museum time is like biblical time. Think Moses wandering the wilderness for 40 years, or Methuselah living to 969, or Sarah conceiving Isaac when she was 90. Things happen but at less-than-supersonic speed.

Daniel Weiss, the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 2015, announced earlier this summer that he’s leaving in a year. Weiss, then the president of Haverford College, was hired by the Met’s trustees to right not only the museum’s fraught finances but also a surfeit of FUBAR operations.

I was skeptical. He’d been at Haverford for only two years, which signals a failed presidency, and it seemed clear that he wanted, whether the trustees knew it or not, to elbow Tom Campbell, the Met’s director, out the door, which he did with Campbell’s help. I liked Tom. He was a curator’s director. Many deficiencies perceived to be his were really the board’s. He was left holding their bag of soiled cat litter.

I don’t think much of today’s breed of college presidents, either. What used to be a corps of serious and inspirational intellects has degraded to fundraisers, construction chiefs, enablers of left-wing kooks, and seekers after the next high-paying job.

Weiss was the Met’s acting director as well as president for a time. Since Max Hollein became the director, Weiss has run the operations of the behemoth museum while Hollein ran the creative side.

Weiss runs a tight ship. He’s led the charge in completing big infrastructure projects such as the refurbishment of Met skylights, which means, basically, replacing the windows and fixing the roof. That’s a big deal. The British Galleries and the European Old Master paintings galleries were redone. The renovation of the Rockefeller wing for African, Oceanic, and Mesoamerican art is underway. He led the Met through the Covid catastrophe. The staff hasn’t unionized.

Weiss also ditched free admission at the Met, in my opinion committing a crime against culture. By abandoning this century-old policy, the Met is now enslaved to the gate. Weiss also created a diversity czar, a high-paid HR bureaucrat who’ll create a stealth quota system in hiring and tiered performance expectations based on race. Diversity and equity is an industry now. Its business model demands not harmony, initiative, and smarts but discord.

Also under his leadership, the Met sold art for operating expenses. The Met, with $4.5 billion in the bank, selling art! That alone forfeited the Met’s leadership as the gold standard in museum practices. During the Covid lockdowns, directors and curators at dozens of financially pressed museums resisted philistine trustees who wanted to balance budgets by selling art rather than upping their giving. “Well, the Met does it” became the philistine retort.

With Weiss leaving, the Met board is merging his and Hollein’s jobs, making Hollein the big bratwurst. I’m very skeptical. Under his creative leadership, the Met has done one clunker show after another. He is a contemporary-art specialist and doesn’t have a Ph.D. He’s not at his best when it comes to quality control.

Why is Weiss staying for an entire year? He’s a lame duck. If Hollein’s not ready to take control of the entire museum now, he’ll never be ready. Why not take his gold watch before the end of 2022? That’ll save the Met half a million dollars.

It’ll take years to clear the wreckage from the Chinese coronavirus mass hysteria, hallucination, and hypnosis but, with Dr. Fauci’s imminent forced retirement, the country will have taken a stride. I’ve written many times about Dr. Little Creep, to distinguish him from Bill Clinton, the Big Creep and another lying, venal opportunist and mediocrity. Dr. Quack said he would stay “until Covid’s in the rearview mirror,” which meant he’d stay forever, and then “until the end of Biden’s term,” which, alas, wasn’t yesterday but will be in 2025.

Last week, he said he’s out in December. It seems like he got a shove from the White House. Even there, the most incredible place on earth, Fauci became a distraction. If Republicans win Congress in November, he’ll be spending his days and nights before committees establishing the astonishing range and depth of his lies. Best for Fauci if this happens to him as a private citizen.

I’ll dwell once more on the National Portrait Gallery’s defilement of its walls and our moral health in commissioning a portrait of this horrible, nasty little person. Fauci’s getting the NPG’s leadership award in November, which means he’ll join presidents, war heroes, sports icons, and Nobel-prize winners in getting a commissioned portrait. Only in Washington would a lifer swamp star be so honored.

Take off your double masks, NPG curators, switch the Zoom echo chamber off, and cancel that appointment for your umpteenth booster. Ask yourselves these questions:

Did Covid leak from the Wuhan lab that Fauci supported with government money?

Did Fauci work to cover this up?

Did Fauci suppress — through threats and intimidation — the Great Barrington Declaration, where numerous eminent doctors, scientists, and economists offered alternatives to a regime of lockdowns?

The answer to each is an obvious “yes,” but if we live in a fact-and-evidence-based reality, “probably” is better than a gullible “of course not,” “blame the bats,” or “too many Twinkies made him do it.” Even if the answer’s “probably” or “maybe,” then he shouldn’t get the honor of an NPG portrait.

In any event, “Ding dong,” as the Munchkins would say. Since the very word “Fauci” suggests fake science, I’ll raise a sticky subject.

Members of the loosely organized climate-hysteria groups Last Generation, the Climate Emergency Fund, and Just Stop Oil have gone to major museums in Italy, the U.K., and Germany and glued themselves to famous works of art such as Constable’s The Hay Wain in London and Raphael’s Sistine Madonna in Dresden. “Mary and Jesus look to the future with fear,” Dresden protesters said. “An equally predictable death will come from climate collapse.” Protesters in London glued a mock version of The Hay Wain over the painting itself. The protesters’ riff tweaked Constable’s scene to show dead flora and fauna, burned to a crisp. At the Vatican Museum, protesters chose the Laocoön sculpture because the subject, a Trojan priest, begged sentries in Troy to destroy the Trojan Horse, fearing correctly that it was a Greek trick. Athena, siding then with the Greeks, sent serpents to strangle the prophetic Laocoön and his sons.

The art in these cases wasn’t badly damaged. The frames, themselves fragile, important works of art, were nicked. The picture glued to The Hay Wain stuck to the varnish on the painting, leaving the paint unaffected. The museum shops ordered a double supply of butterfly nets.

The FBI in Florida isn’t among the tens of thousands of delicate Federal employee flowers still “working from home.” There’s the Mar-a-Lago raid on Mrs. Trump’s lingerie drawer, and then there’s the raid on the Orlando Museum of Art on June 24. Then, the Feds landed, guns drawn and leg irons poised, to seize 25 paintings purported to be by Jean-Michael Basquiat (1960–1988) and exhibited at the museum in the Basquiat show Heroes and Monsters. The pictures are said to be fakes. The FBI’s Art Crimes Team led the charge. Days after the raid, Aaron De Groft, the museum director, whom I don’t know, was fired.

Art forgery happens all the time. In May, a Basquiat painting — a real one — sold at Phillips for $85 million. His record is $110 million. That forgers look at him is logical. The first point I’ll make, aside from this, is that Basquiat isn’t the hardest artist to fake. His work is faux-naïve, 1980s grit stuff. He might have been a very good artist had he lived but, dying at 28, he wasn’t fully formed. He’s a very pricey, recognizable brand, an icon of the AIDS age, with a boisterous, colorful style.

The case of the Basquiat fakes is a teachable moment. De Groft seems to have known there were authenticity problems when he mounted the show. Questions about the art, all from a private collection, existed in the marketplace. De Groft hired an expert on Basquiat to vet them. The expert, the University of Maryland art-history professor Jordana Saggese, got $60,000 for a report suggesting that most were authentic.

The New York Times wrote a good story about the authenticity of these Basquiats in February. There are genuine questions about them. Basquiat’s record-keeping was nonexistent. He is said to have produced about 2,000 works of art. Basquiat is purported to have done the paintings in question in 1982, when he was 22 and not well known, and to have sold them for $5,000 to a Hollywood scriptwriter without the knowledge of Larry Gagosian, his dealer. The works, small and on cardboard, are said to have sat in the writer’s storage unit, forgotten, for 30 years. They entered the marketplace when the facility’s owner confiscated and sold the contents, because the writer hadn’t paid the unit’s rental fee for a while.

I read the story with interest. For the Times, it was good, in-depth reporting. I find that if I know a lot about a subject, it’s rare to read a newspaper story on that subject that isn’t shallow. I finished reading it with my opinion of Basquiat’s quality unchanged. It seemed like a juicy detective story, with evidence for and against.

The cardboard, for instance, in some of the pictures wasn’t produced until after 1982. A scholar, now dead, who chaired the Basquiat estate’s authentication committee, now disbanded, signed a statement concluding that they were authentic. De Groft said, “My reputation is at stake as well.” There was a big photograph of him in the Times bent over one of the Basquiats on an examination table. He wore a yellow tie. “Never trust a man wearing a yellow tie,” my mother often said, among dozens of other bromides. A sure sign, she believed, of insincerity.

De Groft evidently was fired for threatening Saggese in an email when the Times story appeared in February. She told him she didn’t want her name linked to the art’s authentication. “You want us to put out there that you got $60 grand to write this,” he replied. “OK, then. Shut up. You took the money. Stop being holier than thou.”

Don’t people know not to put anything in an email you wouldn’t want your mother — or the FBI or your board chairwoman — to read?

The juiciest part of the story is the role of the board. The board chairman was evidently well aware of all the authentication issues surrounding the Basquiats but never briefed the board on, for instance, the museum’s high and mounting legal fees as the FBI’s interest intensified. Evidently they don’t read the New York Times.

A couple of weeks ago, board members who complained loudly to the local press about secrecy and obfuscation were dumped. It was discovered that they’d exceeded the nine-year term limit imposed by the museum’s bylaws, though they’ve been routinely reappointed. A few days later, the board chairwoman quit. The acting director has also quit.

I’ve never been to the museum. De Groft became the director in 2020, charged by the board with goosing attendance, enthusiasm, profile, and income. He found, in the Basquiat show, a quick high. As museum directors went, I was a risk-taker and cowboy, but I played with outré ideas and artists, never, ever, with work that might be fake.

And trustees, as part of their role as fiduciaries, need to pay attention and ask questions. And don’t push your director to play high-stakes poker with the museum’s reputation.

Last week, both Christie’s and Sotheby’s announced marquee sales for this fall, showing that the art market continues to recover from the Covid calamity. Sotheby’s got the superb collection of the late Joseph Hotung, a Hong Kong–born, London-based businessman and philanthropist who died in 2021. Hotung served as a trustee at the Met for years but is best known for paying for the renovation of the British Museum’s splendid Asian galleries. He bequeathed his collection of Chinese jade sculpture to the BM, but his estate is selling a big chunk of his Asian and European art at Sotheby’s auctions in Hong Kong and London this fall.

The European Old Master, Impressionist, and Post-Impressionist markets are suffering now from a lack of supply. Hotung’s magical Portrait of Eugene Manet by Degas will give a jolt. Degas painted it in 1874 as a wedding present for the sitter, the painter Edouard Manet’s brother, and his bride, Berthe Morisot. Degas’s portraits are very rare. He didn’t do them as a business but, rather, painted his friends. The estimate is £4–6 million.

Christie’s got what might be the biggest haul of all time, though. It’s selling Paul Allen’s collection this fall. Allen, the Microsoft co-founder, died in 2018. It’s only 150 objects, but his La Montagne Sainte-Victoire, by Cézanne, and Small False Start, by Jasper Johns, might each go for over $100 million. If the haul tops a billion dollars, as expected, it will be the most lucrative single-collector auction in history.