When you think of Baltimore, you are probably more likely to associate it with "The Wire" than you are with works of art. It does have some fine museums, however, including the Walters Art Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art, which is still the home of the painting above. I wrote 'still' because recently the museum put Warhol's "The Last Supper" and a couple of other paintings up for sale.
The purpose of the sale was an admirable one, one would think. It was a reaction to the "Black Lives Matter" movement and the money was to be used to support diversity and equity and to raise the salaries of the lower paid employees who were likely not the same colour as the higher paid ones. What could go wrong?
The selling of a painting by a white Warhol and other white artists to raise $65 million in a city that is largely Black, surely should be a sure thing. An earlier sale to raise money to purchase more works by women and Black artists had been successful, but this effort was not. The sale has been cancelled, some board members have resigned and one potential $50 million gift was withdrawn (it gets even messier - the name of one of the anonymous donors was revealed.)
Deaccessioning is the problem and in this case it Trumped the ones related to race relations. There are rules governing the sale of art works housed in non-profit museums. For example, if you donated a painting to the local gallery, you would be pleased if there was a rule to prevent the selling of it to support a grand office party, or even to repair the plumbing. The Association of Art Museum Directors enforces restrictions related to such matters and they have recently relaxed them since many museums are experiencing budgetary problems, some of which are related to the pandemic. One has to be careful in such circumstances as this statement indicates: “If you start monetizing the value of the art on the walls, it raises a whole host of problems and leads to a slippery slope,” Laurence Eisenstein, a leading critic, said. “Next time the state or city are thinking about giving money to the museum, it leads to people asking questions like ‘why don’t you sell some works?’”
This post is in response to an article I read this morning and because blogging is easier than Christmas shopping. A couple of years ago I did write about this issue when a Canadian deaccessioning controversy occurred. The attempted sale of a Chagall by the National Gallery, caused all kinds of problems. Years before that there was a dispute here in London when the University of Western Ontario sold a Cropsey. You can read more about it in this post: Jasper Cropsey ,which I will feature today.
Sources:
"A Baltimore Museum Tried to Raise More Money by Selling Three Pricey Artworks: It Backfired Stupendously," Sebastian Smee and Peggy McGlone, Washington Post, Dec. 6, 2020.
See also: "Baltimore Museum Halts Sales of Three Painting, Including Warhol's "Last Supper," Just Hours Before Auction," Peggy McGlone, Washington Post, Oct. 28, 2020.
The Bonus:
I gather that the University close by is also addressing the Black Lives Matter movement and attempting to do something about the systemic racism that exists there, apparently in clear violation of the HR rules and provincial regulations relating to such things as promotion and hiring. Princeton is doing the same thing as you will learn from the first few paragraphs found in this nicely titled article:
"Keywords: Hoist, Petard: On How Princeton's Crusade Against Systemic Racism Has Backfired," Roger Kimball, New Criterion, Nov. 2020.
Perhaps we ought to have included “chickens” and “roost” among the keywords as well. For many years now, woke administrators, professors, and other activists at all the toniest colleges have been like the parade of flagellants in The Seventh Seal: skirling in public about their sins, above all their institutional or (as we have lately been taught to say) their “systemic” racism. Their cries are accompanied by the demand for alms—$50 million at Yale to support “diversity,” $100 million at Brown for kindred exercises in political penance, and so on.
On September 2, Christopher L. Eisgruber, the president of Princeton University, made a major contribution to this emetic genre. In an open letter to the university “community,” he beat his breast about America’s overdue “profound national reckoning with racism.” He didn’t exclude his own university. Indeed, he beat himself harder as he bemoaned Princeton’s long history of “intentionally and systematically exclud[ing] people of color, women, Jews, and other minorities.” Nor, according to him, has that history ended. “Racist assumptions from the past,” President Eisgruber sobbed, “remain embedded in structures of the University itself.”
His confession did not go unnoticed. On September 16, the Department of Education sent President Eisgruber a letter. The letter minutes an interesting discrepancy. Since Christopher Eisgruber became president of Princeton in 2013, the university has received more than $75 million in taxpayer funds. It has also “repeatedly represented and warranted to the U.S. Department of Education . . . Princeton’s compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” What’s Title VI? Among other things, it’s the law that stipulates that no institution receiving federal funds may discriminate against anyone because of “race, color, or national origin.”
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