Art Happenings, Sublime and Ridiculous

Things went bananas at Sotheby’s when it turned from Tiffany to Chiquita, with a crypto-bro forking over $6.2 million for a bad joke.

I t’s the end of the month and time for my account of November’s top news stories.

Boston University has a distinguished art history department that’s produced very good Ph.D. recipients. I’ve hired some of them over the years and haven’t been disappointed. The university announced last week that it won’t be admitting new graduate students for the fall 2025 academic year in art history and a dozen or so other humanities departments. The school cited “job prospects and placements” as a pivotal deficiency.

Praise the Lord, and my jaw’s agape. Someone in academia has common sense, and someone has a rudimentary understanding of arithmetic. There are too many art history Ph.D.s, too many art history graduate students, and too many art history graduate programs. The field is tiny, and the jobs aren’t there. Tenured professors like having graduate students. It’s prestigious, and they’re cheap labor. Ivy League professors learned in the ’80s that teaching assistants — graduate students — could assume grading and some teaching duties, freeing them, well, from work. Undergraduates suffer. They don’t benefit as much from tenured professors’ knowledge and charisma, if they have any. Graduate students mean well but, most times, haven’t the discernment to grade and teach.

Art history has taken it on the chin in the last few years. As curricula press race, class, and gender idiotica, enrollment in art history classes and numbers of art history majors have cratered. The discipline has lost its way. Boston University has, at least, stopped digging.

Colleges and universities need the firm slap of retrenchment. After a generation of too much money and too much dogma, they’ve turned leaden, incurious, and surly. I hope the new order in Washington cuts the flow o’ dough to the campus fat cats until austerity forces them to focus on basics. Art history graduate programs are small fry. I’d start with race-based and gender-based departments, journalism schools, and law schools and whack their student-loan eligibility.

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The heavy-hitter auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s came and went over the last two weeks. Christie’s had the season’s superstar in René Magritte’s Empire of Light, from 1954, which sold for $121 million, including commissions. Magritte, a Surrealist from Belgium, now joins Warhol, Picasso, Leonardo da Vinci, Modigliani, Bacon, Basquiat, and Klimt in the $100 Million Club — artists whose work hit nine figures in auctions. Money won’t buy happiness, and this mixed bag tells us it’s no judge of distinction, either.

I saw the Magritte. It’s spooky and beguiling, and who am I to argue with Mr. Market? It’s a beautiful painting. It belonged to Mica Ertegun, who died last year and journeyed from pre-war Romanian socialite to impoverished refugee, to marriage to the founder of Atlantic Records and a career as a top New York decorator, to a collector of blue-chip European Modernism.

Always eclectic in taste, I followed the sale at Sotheby’s of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Danner Memorial Window, from 1913, made for the First Baptist Church in Canton, Ohio. I write about stained glass whenever I can. It’s an oddball medium, but the mix of pigment, molten glass, light, and a church setting ought to arouse the aesthetic libido. At 16 feet, it’s big and immersive, with red poppies, four flourishing trees heavy with apples, and a meandering river, set at dusk so the colors are ever-so-muted — crimson, umber, cream, pale blue, flashes of orange, and a hundred greens, in passages of mottled glass but also confetti glass in pure color. Tiffany gets the credit since he’s the big name but, if we’re to credit an artist, it’s Alice Northrop, his head designer. Much of Tiffany’s stained glass was designed by women, who, Tiffany thought, had a superior sense of color and tone.

The window has bounced around since the Canton church sold it in 1990, and for a time, it was in a Japanese collection. Sotheby’s smartly put it in a sale not with American decorative arts but with work by Joan Miró, Paul Signac, Marc Chagall, Franz Marc, and three Surrealists. That makes sense. It’s from 1913 and, for us today, has to be considered modern art for its ghostly color and abstract form. It sold for $12.4 million, an auction record for a stained glass window.

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Things went bananas at Sotheby’s when it turned from Tiffany to Chiquita. Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, any old banana duct-taped to any old wall, sold for $6.2 million. You can’t blame inflation for this bit of monkey business. Comedian’s a joke on the art market and the chattering art class. “What’s art?” the banana asks. Art’s whatever we say it is, sensations come and go, art provokes, blah, blah, blah. As jokes go, Comedian is a hoary one. Marcel Duchamp hung a snow shovel from a ceiling in 1915, called it In Advance of the Broken Arm and a sculpture, critics said it was intriguing and unexpected, and bourgeois morons cooed. Duchamp had a good laugh, but he was a charlatan. Christie’s, by the by, sold a 1964 version of In Advance of the Broken Arm for $3,075,000 at its 20th Century Evening sale on November 19.

For those of us who believe art inspires, emboldens, heals, and heartens, Comedian is disgusting, as is Justin Sun, the 34-year-old cryptocurrency billionaire who bought it. What could that money have done for charity? The list is close to endless. Sun surely believes everything’s fake, and everything’s a joke. What a creep.

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One of my favorite museums, and one of America’s greatest museums, is the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City. Crosby Kemper, the Kansas City banking titan, endowed my position as the director of the art museum at Phillips Academy, in Andover, Mass., so I was able to visit him twice a year to make obeisance and, of course, ask for more money. The museum has a stately Beaux Arts main building, with a gleaming addition, a series of white boxes, designed by Steven Holl. Lit with finesse, the campus glows at night.

I see the Nelson-Atkins wants another addition. What’s the museum planning? You don’t have to be a terrier to smell a rat. The board wants “to transform the museum with a dynamic, open, and inviting design,” with 61,000 square feet of new space, a renovation of the original 1933 building, and “an activation and amplification of the outdoor campus,” which means the museum’s impressive sculpture garden. There’s to be a black-box theater for digital and immersive art, hands-on art space, I presume for children, a new entrance and welcome center, new temporary exhibition galleries, a dedicated center for the Nelson-Atkins’s superb photography collection, and a restaurant and events space.

The Nelson-Atkins, as close to perfect as a museum can be, doesn’t need to be transformed. And Victorian that I am, I see museums as educational institutions, not playgrounds. “Dynamic, open, and inviting” is Epcot-speak. I’ve also watched the museum’s leaders slither and slide into the woke mire over the years. I don’t trust them.

The cost for construction is around $170 million. It’ll be part of a comprehensive campaign with an endowment component, so I expect the museum will go to the Kansas City philanthropic class for $250 million. That’s a lot of moolah. I went to the high-end donor opening of the Bloch building in 2007. As a parochial New Englander, I didn’t realize there are a lot of rich people in Kansas City. Good for them. There are no rich people in ye olde Vermont, where I live, our socialist state government having driven them to Florida, to New Hampshire, God help them, and, who knows, maybe to Kansas City.

The capital campaign for the Bloch building raised $200 million. The Kauffman Center, Kansas City’s sublime performing arts center, opened in 2011 and cost $400 million. We’re headed to 2025, I know, but while the corn there might be as high as an elephant’s eye, and I know that’s Oklahoma, philanthropic money isn’t infinite. Big enchilada capital campaigns depress fundraising for small not-for-profits, in the arts but also for schools, churches, food banks, animal shelters, and I can go on and on. Does the Nelson-Atkins desperately need these new gizmo spaces or are they just nice to have? The museum added a massive new building less than twenty years ago. That’s not a long time between trips to the philanthropic trough.

The museum has assembled a group of six star — expensive — architect finalists flung from Tokyo to Genoa. There’s an open house for them on December 12. Each will submit a proposal over the next few months, with the board selecting an architect this spring.

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Speaking of big bucks, the British Museum announced on November 13 the biggest gift of art in its history, and it was founded in 1753. It’s 1,700 pieces of Chinese porcelain from the tenth to the 18th centuries, much of them imperial porcelain sold by the last lot of Chinese rulers as they gradually went broke. Percival David, whose father founded the Bank of India, assembled the collection from the Teens to his death in 1964.

Last year, I wrote two stories about porcelain in Dresden. Lustrous and pure white, porcelain was much loved by potentates of all stripes, everywhere, but it wasn’t until the 1720s that Meissen, funded by the Saxon dukes, cracked the recipe kept secret for centuries in China and Japan. David’s collection is the best of the best. It’s been on deposit at the British Museum for a few years. David’s been dead for decades but the trustees of his foundation finally made it a gift.

The British Museum could use some good news. It’s still burdened with the shameful theft by, it’s thought, one of its curators of around 2,000 ancient and medieval seals and ornaments made from gems and precious stones. Many were sold on eBay. Bit by bit, the museum is finding where they went and getting them back, though the theft exposed scandalous deficiencies in its security and cataloguing.

Its trustees are, I assume, still hoping to return the sculptures of the Parthenon to the Greeks in an appalling act of woke vanity, but this seems to have stalled as the new Labour government focuses on wrecking the British economy so it has no time for Zeus, Hera, and Apollo. The British own them, and the Greeks have no evidence otherwise, so why give them back, except to look like a fool?

The museum also has a new director, Nicholas Cullinan, who seems promising. He’s hacking through a jungle of ennui and disarray while he leads a £1 billion capital campaign addressing a generation of deferred maintenance.