New York – Eight months after the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s Sensation
exhibit, barely a ripple remains from the torrent of criticism about one of
the show’s major works, a portrait of the Virgin Mary adorned with clumps of
elephant dung. However, the nation’s museums are still in turmoil over
another scandal set off by the show over the ethics of funding for exhibits.
The Brooklyn incident keeps coming up in a new debate over whether business
money that goes to museums means that commerce more than art is dictating
which works get space in important exhibits.
It [the Brooklyn show] made us sit down and really talk about what’s worthy
of our program, said Ruth Abram, president of the Lower East Side Tenement
Museum in Manhattan.
In the Sensation exhibit, the museum was criticized for showing a collection
owned by British ad executive Charles Saatchi and accepting Christie’s
auction house as a sponsor. Both stood to profit from the show since it
could add to the selling power of the young British artists whose
reputations rest largely on shock value.
Diana Pardue, head of the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, said similar
questions over the mixing of art and commerce arise continually, especially
since business is playing a more important role in museum funding.
She cited her own museum’s exhibit on Italian cuisine funded by an Italian
food company and a show of Tiffany works with the Tiffany company as a
sponsor at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
It was a concern not just in our museum, but at the International Council of
Museums a lot of people made the point that it’s usual to get funding from
companies, said Pardue. Marie C. Maloro, a lawyer and author on museum
management and ethics, said that publicity for museum shows gives a hint of
what’s happened as government has bowed out of museum funding and business
has taken up the slack.
Years ago when there was an advertisement for an exhibition it was, you
know, `The National Gallery of Art presents …’ and then, way down at the
bottom in little letters `… with the support of Mobil Oil.’ Now it’s
`Mobil Oil presents…’ and then at the bottom` … The National Gallery of
Art.’
Fallout from the Brooklyn incident has prompted the American Museum
Association to appoint a task force to examine some of the ethical problems
of funding, sponsorship and the exhibition of privately held collections
with final guidelines due out in November.
In a sign of how sensitive the issue is, the task force’s preliminary
findings were to be presented at the association’s annual meeting in
Baltimore earlier this month but were instead kept under wraps.
The influential Association of Art Museum Directors is also trying to come
up with new funding guidelines for its policy handbook Professional
Practices in Art Museums.
Mimi Gaudieri, executive director of the association, which updates the
manual every 10 years, said she believed the whole document needed to be
modernized.
A lot has changed in terms of the funding of exhibitions the decrease in
federal funding, the need to be more creative in finding of funding, and the
reality of expanded audiences, she said.
In a surprise move, the Metropolitan Museum of Art last week pulled the plug
on what would have been a major show a retrospective on fashion designer
Coco Chanel’s works amid concern over commercial sponsorship and how much
artistic control the House of Chanel would have over the show.
Some ethics experts say the Brooklyn incident merely highlighted a trend.
American museums are increasingly struggling with the ethical quagmire of
depending on private funding while maintaining the public trust to display
works based solely on merit rather than their potential profitability.
Museums are going down a slippery slope and I really don’t know where it’s
going to lead, said Maloro, the ethics expert. I imagine that the Brooklyn
Museum of Art is perhaps not that much worse than some, she said. I would
say that they were perhaps a little bit ahead of the curve, but believe me,
there are probably a whole bunch of them right behind who, if they though
they could get away with it, would do the same thing.
The ethical difficulties aren’t necessarily restricted to art museums, and
Gaudieri said she’s interested in knowing more about the funding of exhibits
in science museums, where ties between exhibits and companies are often
close.
Stephen Weil, an emeritus senior scholar at the Smithsonian Center for
Museum Studies, said that to some extent the issue is as old as museums
themselves.
There’s always been a tension between funders and recipients. The
Smithsonian for years has had its own internal rules about what can and
cannot be done for donors, and most museums do, said Weil. Larger museums
have contended with this for years. Part of taking money from people is that
people who pay pipers want to call tunes.
He said that many museums have long been forced to exhibit works in ways
that sometimes don’t make sense because of stipulations made by donors to
display certain collections together or always display certain works
separately.
