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The
Art Set
Charlie Scheips
Last week was contemporary auction week in
New York. It was a hectic, jam-packed
week of parties, openings, and auctions that brought
the international art set here to take the temperature
of the market. The result: it’s boiling hot.
Phillips de Pury sale of a chunk of Princess Gloria von
Turn und Taxis’s contemporary art holdings brought
$7.3 million. At Christie’s boisterous evening sale on Tuesday
$157.4 million of art changed hands with records set for 18 artists.
One Rothko alone, his Homage
to Matisse from 1954 sold for a staggering $22.4
million. Then on Wednesday, a more somber sale at Sotheby’s
still managed to bring in $114.4 million. The star of the evening
was David Smith’s sculpture CUBI XXVIII from 1965 going for $23.8 million to Los Angeles collector
Eli Broad. And
finally, Phillips de Pury’s evening sale, which auctioneer
Simon de Pury has tweaked into a sale aimed at a younger and hipper
market, brought $22.8 million.
All over the city galleries, private dealers, and collectors undoubtedly
cracked-up millions more in sales—so it’s no wonder
that almost everyone in the contemporary art world flocks here
during this week.
I kicked off the week on Monday at Art/Basel/ Miami’s cocktail
party in the Penthouse of the Hudson Hotel. I went over with Rory
Howard, the private dealer from London. Amidst the
throng I ran into a cross-section of the contemporary art phalanx
of the
art
set: U.S. Trust’s Stephanie French, Art/Basel’s
director Sam Keller, Paul and Alice Judelson, Perry Rubenstein and Sara
Fitzmaurice, New Museum trustee Laura Skoler. I
also chatted with Sharon Hoge and Jill
Spalding during the party
which celebrated
the arrival of the first copies of this year’s catalog
for the art fair hot off the presses. The Fair runs this year
at the
Miami Convention Center from December 1-4.
Afterwards we headed up to a private reception for
the Egon
Schiele: Works from the Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections, one
of this season’s best exhibitions in a season of truly
magnificent shows including Van Gogh: The Drawings and the Fra
Angelico at the Metropolitan; and Memling’s Portraits at
The Frick Collection. There are also important exhibitions in galleries
that opened last week including the spectacular Yves Klein:
A Career Survey at L & M Arts; Cy Twombly: Bacchus at Gagosian uptown;
as well as The Third Eye: Fantasies, Dreams, and Visions at
Richard L. Feigen—a companion exhibition to MOMA’s Beyond the
Visible: The Art of Odilon Redon.
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| Van
Gogh: The Drawings and the Fra Angelico |
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On Tuesday, I went to one of Paul Beirne’s intellectually
stimulating luncheons for the new book Who Owns the Past? Cultural
Policy, Cultural Property, and the Law (Rutgers University
Press.) The catalyst for the book was Ashton Hawkins (who
for years was chief counsel to the Metropolitan Museum) and editor Kate
Fitzgibbon, an Asian art specialist. The book comprises a series of essays, in non-technical language,
that provide an overview of the development of cultural property
law and practices, as well as case studies of recent legal activity
in this area that have affected museums and private collectors
of ownership of art from other countries. It ranges from art and
antiquities to Nazi-era stolen art. Legal scholars, museum professionals,
art dealers, collectors, and anthropologists all made contributions
to this fascinating and important book.
Theses
luncheons, held in Beirne’s offices overlooking Central
Park forty floors below, always draw a diverse crowd—this
one attended by Kent Barwick, Christopher Bollen, Heather
Cohane, Charles Cowles, Beth DeWoody Sean Driscoll, Susan and Andre
Emmerich,
Sherman Goldman, John Scharffenberger, Andrew Klink, Manuela V.
Hoelterhoff, Hillie Mahoney, Judith Price, Justin Rockefeller and Shelby
White as well as a host of lawyers and other interested
parties that make up Bierne’s wide circle of friends and
colleagues. Both Ashton Hawkins and Kate Fitzgibbon took questions
from the audience — with Ashton starting off with a
brief synopsis of the current situation involving Getty curator Marion
True who was indicted in Italy along with two dealers for conspiring
to import looted antiquities. But that is just one of many calamities
facing the wealthy museum and its parent the Getty Trust.
On Sunday, a week ago, the New York Times ran a cover story by
Randy Kennedy on the ever-expanding
chaos at the J. Paul Getty Museum and Trust. It was a
detailed
expose of the museum’s
problems and the people and conditions, which have helped
create them. I thought that Kennedy missed a fundamental
point: it
is the critical problem facing all sections of our society
today.
The almost complete erosion of the boundaries separating
the creative and business interests in most of our primary
societal
institutions.
Most social institutions—government, cultural, educational,
the press, religious, scientific and even our religious institutions—have
operated during the course of the modern age with a balance between
“creating” the content of a given social
insititution and those “distributing and consuming” that
content.
Simply put—it’s the primacy of the legislation and
rule of law over the financing of campaigns; the excellence of
an exhibition or performance over the benefit fundraiser; the news
story over the advertising. The scientific discovery over the grant,
it’s the prayer verses the collection plate. In the old days,
we called it separation of church and state—no matter
which sector of the social matrix we were speaking of.
The central problem facing the Getty is that the business side
of that wealthy institution has far outstripped and overwhelmed
the curatorial and grant-making mission on which the tax-exempt
status of the museum and trust is based. The reason for
any museum’s
existence is to expose, illuminate, support and conserve
the valuable cultural artifacts of our world. It seems that
instead,
the Getty
has replaced this mission with one that reflects CEO Barry
Munitz’ own
career experience—that of a bureaucratic administrator.
After all, people get hired for what they do best. And
museums around
the country have been hiring inept MBA types on an increasingly
regular basis.
Former Getty Museum director John Walsh was an Old Master
expert who cut his teeth at America’s pre-eminent museum—the Metropolitan. When the
Getty hired him as director in the early 1980s they were getting a respected
scholar who they charged which supervising the development of the most ambitious
new museum in the second half of the 20th century—in America’s youngest
cultural capitol. Which underscores another misconception that museum boards
increasingly re-enforce—that creative or intellectual people can’t
also be excellent administrators as well.
After the Museum‘s Richard Meier-designed complex
opened in the late 1990s, Walsh retired allowing a new generation to
take the reins
as the museum went
into its next phase as a major cultural center. Unfortunately, it seems
that the Getty trustees (who are not even required to give money unlike
most museums)
saw it as their chance to expand their powers and while Walsh’s
successor Deborah Gribbon was
an accomplished insider at the Museum—she didn’t
have the outside clout to keep the ever-expanding trustees and Trust president
Munitz’s tenure in balance with the Getty’s mission. She left last
year citing differences in creative vision between the Getty’s ruling cadre
and her understanding of her duties as the Museum’s director. Former
Morgan Library curator William Griswold was named as acting director but later pulled
himself out of the running for Director to instead become director of Minneapolis
Institute of the Arts.
This culture war has been snowballing since the beginnings of the NEA crisis
of the late 1980s. But ever since the current Bush Administration, I have noticed
that business interests or what you may call the MBA-tinged approach to problem-solving
seem to have dominated most societal initiatives from the war in Iraq to the
running of our cultural institutions. It is almost as if Bush has given other
leaders in other social fields license to operate on a purely profit and loss
basis.
How accustomed we have come to this new social reality was revealed by
Ashton Hawkins when I asked him at the luncheon if he thought that some
of the problems
facing our cultural institutions had to do with the people in command
at places like the Getty—those who have little or no background
in the content of its mission.
His reply to my question was fatalistic: “Welcome to American museums.” His
answer is further underscored by the ridiculous number of huge museum expansions
around the country that is more about ego building for the donors than filling
the museum’s with quality art. And lets not fail to mention the
hand wringing and flip-flopping going on about any cultural representation
at
the World Trade
Center development.
A few years ago, Metropolitan Director Philippe de Montebello (himself
a former Met curator) gave an address to an American Association of Museums
gathering
in which he emphasized that he saw his job as creating the environment
where his curators could focus on what they did best without the encumbrance
of
financial considerations. The Getty sole purpose—especially with its enormous wealth
should be its exhibitions and programs. With the Met’s truly once in a
lifetime Van Gogh and Fra Angelico exhibitions currently on view—as well
as treasures throughout the museum that we can visit on any given day, we already
have an example for the Getty’s Trustees and new director Michael
Brand to follow.
Let’s hope they rise to the occasion!
While writing this column I kept thinking of Shelley’s
great poem Ozymandias.
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
" My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley |
