Money, Ethics, Art: Can Museums Police Themselves?

Mr. Cotter’s opening salvo that “many of those relics were stolen goods” is a cheap shot at what is actually an historically fortunate effort by generations of artistically sensitive folks to commission, save, share with community, excite people of one culture with that of another in living with and exhibiting the artistic work of little known sculptors, painters, engravers, calligraphers for a larger public. As I noted while living in Paris in the 90’s and reading the International Herald Tribune, the decision of the New York Times to substitute the business of auctioning Art for reporting the work and life of artists spelled the end on an arts epoch. We are now living with all the financial and social repercussions of what the Times decided to sell, having left the artists to their own marketing ingenuity and corporate and financial interests to call the shots in the museum world, goading on the unstoppable inflation of Art, only recently being reconsidered. But is there any other way now that the Church has lost its hold over artistic content and the political gamers more ignorant than any monarchic/ aristocratic financier of history’s artists, calling the shots?

First, no one can police him/her/itself. That is a myth. The protest and the outside opinion...the protest...is the perfect example of legitimate policing. It is uncomfortable but necessary. Self-policing is a confortable myth of those with policing power. Second, the alternative to imperfection is not utopian perfection. Those without sin cast the first stone...or some such thing. The opposite of imperfection is an exchange to move toward greater perfection. If perfection is to be the standard all will fall. In South Africa Nelson Mandela allowed for a reconciliation with those exercising power imperfectly. There is no other way.

The self-righteous outrage motivating this article and the views of so many of the Biennial artists is so stifling that I've decided to simply avoid the Biennial this year. (No great loss--the last one was so dispiriting.) Be an activist or an artist, not both. Contemporary art arising from a political agenda is invariably dull and hollow.

Should they sell The Hoppers, after all he did hold right wing views? Maybe acquire some Rockwells , seening that Norman ,maybe, wasn't really a "ladies man"? Where does this all end? Plug in any latest 'wrong' and of course you will end up with shiny hero, opps wrong gender, saving us from Balthus...... or the robber barons who acquired works by, well whomever. We are on a slippery slope here.

Watch out that this debate doesn't get out of hand. The rich are rich enough to respond by taking back their donated collections and depositing them in corporate museums that could become strong competitors to the museums that booted them. The Barnes in Philadelphia is a prototype of such a corporate museum. Would that the Philadelphia Museum of Art had received its works a century ago! The problem here is not just who contributes art works to public museums. It often can be the works themselves. How many objects in the MET offend the sensibilities of right and left wing visitors? How many of them can be viewed as colonial, racist, sexist, homophobic, capitalist, communist, anti-Christian, pro-Christian, antisemitic, degenerative and on and on? Which iconoclasts should the pubic museum cater to? And what might that entail? Ditching, destroying or mothballing those offending works? Is iconoclasm making a comeback?

The wealthy and powerful have always used art to advertise their wealth and power. In the past, the aristocracy and the church were the big supporters of the arts; now it's mostly corporations and individuals who have made their fortune from corporations. Eventually some of their treasures end up in public museums where all can enjoy and learn from them -- and that's a good thing. Museums have been under attack from the right since the Reagan years -- cutting funds for the arts is a Republican mantra -- and now from the left, demanding that museums don't accept money that is ethically compromised. The result will be fewer opportunities for people to enjoy and learn from art.

Perhaps because of space limitations, Mr. Cotter’s mention of Hans Haacke only touches on the example of the MoMA visitor’s poll. But Haacke’s subsequent work – in the early 70s – embroiled him in another controversy, when he had a scheduled solo show abruptly cancelled by the Guggenheim, because the informational content of his project (about the web of companies created by a family of NYC slumlords) wasn’t “sublime” enough to be considered “art” by the museum’s director. Haacke’s immediate response was to produce another work, detailing the ties of several Guggenheim board members to the major copper mining company that had sought Nixon and Kissinger’s help in overthrowing the Allende government and installing the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Haacke has also collaborated with the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose writing on the problem of being co-opted (i.e. that art seeking to criticize the art world becomes digested by the very beast it tries to criticize) was prescient. Cotter’s warning to D.T.P. might well reference Bourdieu. In general, I am more concerned by the attitude of certain artworld professionals, like Robert Storr, who suggested (here in Guadalajara, in 2008) that the best way for artists to “be political” in today’s world is NOT through strident denunciation of specific issues but rather by “subtle” intervention in the world, like when Gabriel Orozco gave fresh oranges every morning to people wealthy enough to live adjacent to the MoMA.

Decolonize This Place and other professional agitators are simply hijacking the spotlight for themselves at the expense of others. In the Whitney's case, the artists and their work. I believe a lot of the artists felt pressured to sign that letter. To think that any institution can be "purified" and that "truth" will prevail is deeply naive. It goes against history. All these folks are, in the end, anarchists who want to bring the "system" down. They propose no serious alternatives. It's ultimately a selfish & destructive act. If you want to make structural changes, come up with solutions to replace the existing structures, otherwise you have no credibility.

Art museums in the United States are largely funded by, and run by, the super-rich. Their tastes and interests drive institutional priorities in collecting, exhibiting, etc. And there is almost no separation between (ostensibly non-profit) museums and the art market. It is THOROUGHLY corrupt. Board members routinely encourage museums to buy works by artists they personally collect, thereby raising these artists' status and their works' value. To fund exhibitions, curators routinely include works owned by prominent collectors, since they are dependent on them for donations. Powerful galleries help underwrite exhibitions by their artists, and reap the $$ rewards.

Have we taken a look lately at the sources of wealth of the Carnegies, Mellons, Fords, Morgans, Gettys, and DuPonts et al? Lots of questionable business practices and harmful products in the mix as they amassed their fortunes. And yet a great deal of good has come from that wealth. It is fair to question the system but those looking for purity will be repeatedly disappointed.

To adapt a quote from Tallulah, "We are all as pure as the driven slush." Yes, hopefully museum boards might be more thoughtful in the future about selecting board members and giving naming rights, but no one has a background that is without flaws, except maybe Mother Teresa. And she had no money.

I'm constantly amazed how people feel empowered to tell other people, private citizens, what to do with their money. If people don't like the Sacklers, don't visit their wing of the museum or the museum itself. If they don't like the art that hangs on the walls, don't go to that museum. In fact start your own museum! But I am sure their hands will be outstretched for donations when they quickly learn that museums cost money.

"Behind every great fortune is a great crime." So what else is new?

What I find most disturbing about Kanders is that he spoke only to save himself and didn't show any concern for the use of his products in the military. That shows a person who doesn't any responsibility for his actions. Not someone we want at the head of our museums. He must go. The Guggenheim showed extreme disrespect to animals and then made excuses like civil liberties. The Guggenheim has a long history of not supporting human rights now they can add animals rights to that list as well. Moma has a long history of abuse towards their employees. While the staff had to strike for decent wages in 2000. (a front desk person at that time made $12,000 a year for full time work) the director of the museum Glenn Lowry secretly had his salary paid by trustees to bring it over $1 million. Look at what the New Museum has just done to their employees. New, my foot.

No doubt Mr Cotter and others who decry the nature of Mr. Kanders' business nonetheless have been quite happy to accept the defense of their lives and property by various governments. Certainly their ilk could not have so happily accomplished their colonization of formerly working-class Brooklyn without protection from 40,000 of N.Y.'s Finest under arms -- tear gas, guns and all. As such, angst over Whitney board ethics looks more like schoolyard bullying than a matter of conscience. And about those Tate Museum morals -- Tate's was a sugar fortune, sweated out under hot sun.

I think it is worth mentioning that in fact Museum Directors do not select or remove Trustees. Generally that is the responsibility of a Governance or Nominating Committee with approval of the Board (or some portion of the Board). Given the extended negative media attention to the case it surprises me that Mr. Kanders has not stepped aside voluntarily. More broadly it seems untenable to me that we can invoke a purity test for philanthropists. As Mr. Cotter notes, government funding for the arts is meager. In order to perform a public benefit, museums must seek support from individuals or corporations that some people may deem unsavory.

To the victor go the spoils of war.

The tensions make for great art, but grumpy administrators.

It’s always invigorating to see everyone so moral mounting their high horse to tell everyone else what to do. However, all these sullied rich people also donate to hospitals and medical facilities and I haven’t seen anyone demanding that they take their money back. What’s really happening here is that the Mr. Cotter, speaking for the art world, is prepared to say that art is not at all important and it need not be funded. Sure give everything back to their sources (good luck finding the true source) and charge high admission fees to empty museums. Hypocrisy has the very best bedfellows.

Using tear gas on migrants A Dry Corridor runs through wide swaths of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras where it is typically arid, and sometimes even drier. Even though it is difficult to raise food there, families have many children. The following is from the 3/8/11 PBS Newshour segment titled "In Guatemala, Family Planning Clashes with Religion, Tradition”. "Stories about the dangers of birth control are often linked to religion ...” "Here, populations are overwhelmingly Mayan and overwhelmingly religious. Women typically have eight, nine, 10 children.” "Years ago, more children meant more hands to work the land. But generation after generation, farms are divided into smaller and smaller plots. There's less food to harvest.” For the past few years, the Dry Corridor has been in drought so there has been little to harvest. Despite awareness of Trump’s stance on migrants, and despite being invited by Mexican authorities to apply to live in Mexico, most members of the migrant caravan chose to come to the U.S. When refused immediate entry, some grouped and charged the border. Rocks were thrown and many had climbed the fence before tear gas was used. Should we allow in every migrant who is able to cross the border, especially when we know that up to 40% do not show up for their immigration hearings? Instead of asylum, we could offer them food aid and family planning.

An important article raising complicated and necessary questions but one point confuses me. Cotter quotes Weinberg, "“As members of the Whitney community, we each have our critical and complementary roles: trustees do not hire staff, select exhibitions, organize programs or remove board members, and staff does not appoint or remove board members.” I don't have Weinberg's full letter or the Whitney by-laws but if their trustees do not "remove board members", who does?

If these protesters actually wanted to change the world, they would invest in themselves, develop skills, monetize such skills and, finally, donate the fruits of their labor to those in need. But that's far to hard and involves next to no instant gratification. Far easier to just show up somewhere and make noise. If that is truly what makes them feel validated in this world, so be it. But please realize, there are so many other paths to helping the most vulnerable, some, I would argue, much more effective.

As a thought experiment, apply the rule of Six Degrees Of Separation to the protestors themselves – or for that matter to any American citizen – and observe how quickly each and every one gets revealed as an accomplice benefitting from the spoils of empire. From this it follows logically that not just art museums should be shut down post-haste, but all of American culture, and society along with it. After that it’s simply a matter of whether Trump can sell to the Russians the ruined remains of the former state, before they up and seize it from him. Hopefully the Midwest corn fields won’t be too polluted by fracking.

This is EXACTLY what I said when I read the NYT post early this m morning about the sale of stolen Middle Eastern artifacts, ISIS and rich Americans using them for tax advantages. It's a criminal conspiracy and SO obvious if one connects the dots. Same issue with Trump's obstruction and Russian/Saudi/ Deutsche Bank and money laundering. Do your homework - it's all out there any VERY important if you want honest government and rule of law.

The Metropolitan Museum’s problem is a lot bigger that the Sackler opiod dealers. The names Havermeyer (big sugar) and Rockefeller (big oil) are long associated with that institution. Oil may very well be necessary for how we chose to generate energy, but its labor and environmental history is troubling. And work on in sugar cane fields was next to slavery until quite recently. Worse for the Metropolitan Museum, the board chose to put the Koch name on the front fountain. Besides a sign for the theatre, that is the only name on the front of the building. The Koch fortune isn’t simply rooted in big oil, petrochemicals, massive corporate welfare, and environmental abuses; to a large degree the fortune is based on the Koch father building refineries for Stalin and the Nazis. The Met could have avoided this indiscretion by simply thanking David Koch with a nice plaque inside instead of putting the Koch name on the building. Then the NYPL.... Submitted May 9th 1:35 PM Eastern

What--no mention of the Guerrilla Girls ("Do women have to be naked to get into the Met")??? Your inclusion of Nan Goldin provided comic relief. She arguably exploited addicts in her early work, now that SHE became an addict she's indignant about it and leverages her access to wealth and fame to her own further advantage. Her protests are funded by the Sachler money--the very machine she decries. The hypocrisy is gobsmacking.

Look, not all museums are the Met. The majority of the over 8,000 museums in this country are small to medium-sized institutions that continue to rely on the generosity of private donors to sustain them. Museums are nonprofit institutions that should act in the public trust, so the Met is just as responsible for ethical conduct as any local historical society museum. The problem with the Met and other museums like it is that their board of trustees are responsible for ethical and professional conduct, so if they drop the ball, they are not doing due diligence. Most museums work on limited budgets and resources with dedicated personnel and volunteers. So please, do not lump the Met with the many other wonderful museums in the country. As with any institution, there will always be a few bad actors, but don't hang museums out to dry because of a few bad apples in the bunch.

No good deed goes unpunished. A magnifying glass could uncover issues with the American Cancer Society, Planned Parenthood, or almost any other large nonprofit organization. Is this where we want to spend our energy? Fighting nonprofits trying to do good and sometimes falling slightly short?

Much of what's in our greatest museums has been saved from time, war, pillage, and -- worse -- indifference. Right now, treasures from Iraq are showing up on eBay. All through the Aegean, temple fragments have been worked into retaining walls or -- worse -- melted down for lime. I assure you the British Museum's caryatids are in better shape than the ones left until recently on the Erechtheum, on the Acropolis in Athens. Some things were stolen, yes, and many of those have been returned. But I would hope that our great museums remain, as they have been, caretakers of our antiquities and art. And if it takes big-bucks fundraisers and patrons to do that -- and from early times patrons there always have been-- then good.

Reading through the comments, I'm shocked at how many people adopt a kind of anti-ethics, who say, in effect, that museums, like all of us, need money, and any criticism of where the money comes from is just a kind of hypocritical holier-than-thou attitude. Which would suggest that money does, as the author writes, "convert everything into itself," including ethics & morality. I'm the first to say that there is no purity in this world. Which simply means that we all must be willing to accept criticism & examine ourselves, as well as demand higher standards from others, especially in public institutions. Certainly a society as unimaginably wealthy as ours has the ability and the obligation to take responsibility for what its money does. An art museum that relies on blood money from Safariland, or the Kochs, is robbing the work it exhibits of any social worth or ethical validity, IMO.

museums along with world monuments and UNESCO sites, parks, etc. are missing such an easy and environmentally sound way to raise a lot of money, it is shocking to me. (stay tuned, it WILL be coming soon). Instead, as with everything these days, its only the mega rich who get to be on boards and make all the decisons and they usually have their own agenda.

A local news station broadcast videotape of Cher singing while standing by the Temple of Dendur at the Met Museum this past Monday and her audience, apparently hand-picked by the editor of a fashion magazine, was a large group of people paying $30,000 each for the night's party admission. It was an annual desecration of the people's museum. If a celebrity is big enough and the price is right, there is no policing and partying among the relics goes on. The museums only put a halt to such abuses of power when they get caught.

Wealth is what usually determines who is on a museum board. Museum directors too often are rewarded for opening new wings--either through building or redesigning and better using space. And also for acquisitions. Unfortunately, most museums have very substantial collections in storage. Some items will never be exhibited because they are not good enough quality. And yet too often museums do not aggressively de-accession.

OK the SJW's don't want donations from the bad guys, not counting income redistribution of course, so the bad guy picks up her paintings and goes home. No big deal, the museum has more. But wait, are the holier than though folks going to pay the light bill, maintenance, the preservationist's salaries, etc? From the looks of the protesters in the photos, I don't think so. I believe Cervantes pointed out a long time ago the problems with fantasy journeys. It would take a hundred year swap meet to return everything so that is pretty problematic also. You should probably have a plan before you start a protest or everything you want to tear down may just stay down.

"Money is the universal solvent. It converts everything into itself. Aesthetic value measured in dollars has, of course, always been part of the talk about art. " "We need these institutions, which include our art museums, to be proactive alternative environments, in which standardized power hierarchies are dissolved.." So "we" need to do what "we" have just defined as impossible to do because it violates the eternal laws of Art and Capital as "we have just defined them?!!! I guess"our" hands are tied, then? Paul Werner author, "Museum, Inc."

I go to an art museum to immerse myself in the art, and enjoy the response I get from observing the artwork. If we sanitize the museums of every piece where some part of the provenance disturbs someone - a sin of the artist, or the donor, or a previous owner, or a corporation that supported the work, etc, I'm afraid we will eliminate a tremendous amount of insight and enjoyment from our lives. Eventually (albeit a long time from now), these details will fade, and the art will be appreciated for it own value - who cares about the sculptor of Venus de Milo or other pieces of art from antiquity?

The writer is welcome to move to any country where the museums and galleries are actively policed by the government. It's easy to carp when both sides have the freedom to speak.

Really appreciated the forthright honesty of such lines as "The letter ends up being a very long way of saying “Sorry, we need Mr. Kanders’s money.”" One needn't equivocate about the meaning of an event or statement to avoid passing a partisan judgement on it.

"Watch whose money you pick up." - William S. Burroughs In solidarity I attended last Friday's protest at the Whitney because I believe artists have responsibility to hold arts institutions accountable for the money they pick up. A chemical weapons manufacturer on the board of the Whitney is unacceptable. HIGH FIVE to organizations like Decolonize This Place and artists like Nan Goldin for turning up the heat. It's imperative we have these discussions as a society.

art and culture had always involved the belated generosity of the powerful and rich who used and abused power to become rich. think Medicis, many european Royals, Freer and Frick, Thyssen and Rockefellers. we accept their gifts as a payment to society and we don’t look too closely at their modus vivendi

I decided some time ago that if I had to agree with the politics of the producers of all I consume then I would have to move to the hills and live off the land. Better to stick to the big fights and live with the micro-aggressions.

Ironic that Nan Goldin was the mother of "Heroin Chic". Politics is ruining art.

The art world is both the most honest and dishonest domain. But these days it is looking a lot more dishonest. If you go behind the facade of most new major collectors (or big museum donors), few made their money without exploitation or worse... global criminal activity.

Oh, no! Don't tell me we're asking the monied and the powerful to display the ethics demanded of the grubby underclass. What's a philanthropist to do? If nothing else, perhaps we can credit the Sackler family with exposing the cynical practices that served them so well for so long.

"Emmanuel Macron, proposed in 2018 that objects looted from Africa during an earlier colonial era be returned, on demand, to their places of origin" Hmmm, when is he going to propose that France returns all the art and artifacts that Napoleon looted in Europe ?

Surprised about the lack of mention of the Tate in London here - who are (quite rightly in my opinion) no longer accepting donations from the Sackler’s. Perhaps an example of bowing to pressure, or is it self policing...?

If you wish to believe that history shows that the world's greatest artists had or have their works available for view in public art museums, you are mistaken. The idea that the general public should/could have had access to fine works of art is historically relatively new – Paris during Napoleon's governance, was first art museum opened to all the public. And most public art museums today display only a fraction of the artwork they own. Don't sound so shocked and surprised that the wealthy – whether kings, queens, dictators, popes, potentates, or barons of business/trade – own art and keep it from public view. That's just history's way! I'm sure they believe, and have believed, deservedly so! AND If one establishes the standard that museums can accept [and exhibit] works of art donated only by benefactors deemed "honorable", the grand structures where history's artistic troves of treasure are currently displayed across the globe will stand essentially empty. The same holds for theatre and film.