curators

This page considers museums, libraries, galleries and other institutions as custodians and creators of value.

It covers -

• introduction
• cooption
• conflicts and casualties
• deaccessioning
• studies

     introduction

It is traditional for non-commercial galleries, museums, educational institutions and scholars to lament that they are victims of the market or that they operate in a separate sphere, concerned with timeless aesthetic values rather than vulgar commerce.

In fact institutions and scholars are an integral part of the market and have been for around 200 years, since at least the emergence of the modern museum and recognition of art scholarship as both an academic discipline and a profession.

They have a fundamental roles in establishing and maintaining perceptions of value, through for example -

• a key role as the final resting place of many works, absorbing works from the market and thereby raising values by increasing scarcity
• signalling the value of works (and indeed genres) through incorporation in collections (dealers often highlight that a particular artist's work is held in leading art museums)
• signalling the value of works through scholarly monographs, conference papers and articles on individual works, individual artists, schools and genres
• providing essential tools such as the catalogue raisonne for particular artists
• signalling value through 'retrospective' exhibitions of contemporary artists and through exhibition of works from public and private collections (dealers thus often note that an individual work has been displayed by a major institution as part of an exhibition and featured in the associated exhibition catalogue)
• identification, preservation and publication of archival documentation (for example diaries, letters, wills, inventories and other material) that enables the determination of provenance, influence, originality and authenticity
• provision of independent forensic examination, often using specialist tools and expertise, to identify whether antiquities or other works are forgeries.

As mentioned in the preceding page of this note, scholars are essential gatekeepers, performing tasks that

• are beyond the capacity of dealers and auctioneers (most for example do not have major conservation laboratories )
• businesses are not willing to undertake (dealers are concerned with revenue and profit; most are uninterested in original research and in the words of one Canberra dealer "don't have the luxury of tenure in a sheltered workshop")
• businesses cannot be fully entrusted to undertake (it is clear that some major auction houses and dealers knowingly break the law, deliberately deceive consumers and relentlessly 'look on the bright side').

Conflicts of interest evident in the career of figures such as Berenson are thus particular egregious.

     conflicts and casualties

The impact on curatorial institutions is multidimensional.

In 1989 Robert Hughes pronounced that

From the point of view of American museums, the art-market boom is an unmitigated disaster. These institutions voice a litany of complaints, a wrenching sense of disfranchisement and weakness, as their once adequate annual buying budgets of $2 million to $5 million are turned to chicken feed by art inflation. "There are many areas where museums can no longer buy," says James Wood, director of the Art Institute of Chicago. "It's bad for the museums, but it goes beyond that. It's bad for the country." The symbol of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's plight is an annual booklet that used to be titled Notable Acquisitions. In 1986 it was renamed Recent Acquisitions because, as the museum's director Philippe de Montebello wrote, the rise in art prices "has limited the quantity and quality of acquisitions to the point where we can no longer expect to match the standards of just a few years ago".

In Australia and elsewhere the situation is somewhat more complex. Institutions have traditionally complained that their funding, whether from endowments or from government, is inadequate and is not keeping pace with markets or with demands for upgrading facilities, conservation, publication, staff recruitment and community outreach.

It is clear that many institutions are priced out of the market during art booms, whether permanently or because there is a lag in grant-making and fund raising. Many, however, can rely on donations (whether because the donor gains tax advantages, perpetuation of memory or an opportunity to boost the value of similar works that can be sold/donated in future).

Critics of deaccessioning have griped that institutions are sometimes disingenuous, as most art museums display only a small fraction of their holdings and on occasion have engaged in deaccessioning (whether to boost funds used to pay for staff or to make new acquisitions).

Other critics have argued that some institutions, whether through pragmatism or a crisis of confidence in their mission civilatrice, have sold out to the market by fostering blockbuster exhibitions and acquisition announcements centred around the cost of the new item or how much the 'priceless' collection would go for if sold. Such critics comment that institutional executives have only themselves to blame if they fail to catch big fish after fostering a culture in which their performance – and the standing of their institutions – is based on hammer prices in auction rooms.

A more subtle criticism is that higher prices at sales drive higher insurance premiums and theft of major items, some apparently stolen on the basis that the owner will pay a ransom for return of the work rather than for sale to a private collector.

An Australian conservator offered a dissenting view, commenting to us that increased insurance is good because it will inhibit

frivolous shipping pieces backwards and forwards in loans for exhibitions that are so crowded that few people get to see the item en route to buying something at the exhibition shop.

     deaccessioning

Some institution have responded to financial stringencies, fashion or curatorial boredom by deaccessioning part of their holdings – ie selling paintings and other works that they had either purchased or that had been gifted to them. Some deaccessioning has concerned 'duplicate' or 'non-core' works, often to enable acquisition of items that are more in vogue. Other disposal has involved shedding parts of a collection – in some instances hundreds of prints, paintings and books – that a director or chairman didn't like and were rarely on display.

It poses a number of questions. One is simply bad faith: few works are gifted to institutions with the expectation that they will be sold when reputations change. Another is that much deaccessioning looks inept, with institutions clearing unwanted works only to realise twent or thirty years later that what was sold is more valued than what was then acquired.

Deaccession necessarily increases the circulation of those commodities that are not destroyed and accordingly can be welcomed by dealers and collectors. Along with much of the German intelligentsia Hitler's gift to liberal democracies was forced deacquisition of modernist works from national and provincial collections.

     studies

Literature on the emergence of curatorial institutions and questions of accessibility (with for example a move away from the 'temple of the arts' for economic/cultural elites and towards themeparks where the profane masses can enjoy the 'Impressionist Experience') is often self-reflexive and tightly focussed. There is are surprisingly few major works exploring the role of institutions - and of scholars - in creating value.

Points of entry to the literature include Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1997) by Philip Fisher, The Public Art Museum in Nineteenth Century Britain: The Development of the National Gallery (Aldershot: Ashgate 2005) by Christopher Whitehead, The Birth of the Museum (London: Routledge 1995) by Tony Bennett, Whose Muse?: Art Museums and the Public Trust (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2006) edited by James Cuno, Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (Aldershot: Ashgate 2004) edited by Donald Preziosi & Claire Farago, The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 2000) by Francis Haskell and Museums and the Future of Collecting (Aldershot: Ashgate 2004) edited by Simon Knell.

They might be suppplemented by Cabinets For The Curious: Looking Back At Early English Museums (Aldershot: Ashgate 2006) by Ken Arnold, Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ithaca: Cornell Uni Press 2000) by Susan Crane, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill: Uni of North Carolina Press 2002) by H Glenn Penny, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1994) by Andrew McClellan, How New York Stole The Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 1985) by Serge Guilbaut, The Transformation of the Avant-Garde: The New York Art World, 1940-1985 (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 1989) by Diana Crane, Hunters & Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1996) by Tom Griffiths, Degenerates & Perverts: the 1939 Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art (Carlton: Miegunyah 2005) by Eileen Chanin & Steven Miller and Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Touchstone)
by Thomas Hoving.

Monographs on particular endowments, institutions or collections - and the less-accessible reports by trustees - sometimes offer insights about interaction with the market. One example is Mr Felton's Bequests (Carlton: Miegunyah Press 2003) by John Poynter. There is a narrower view in Werner Pommerehne & Lars Feld's 1997 'The Impact of Museum Purchase on the Auction Prices of Paintings' in Journal of Cultural Economics 21.

Studies of institutions include The Nation's Mantelpiece: A History of the National Gallery (London: Pallas Athene 2007) by Jonathan Conlin, The Tate: A History (London: Tate Gallery 1998) by Frances Spalding, The British Museum: A History (London: British Museum 2002) by David Wilson, Vision & Accident: The Story of the Victoria & Albert Museum (London: V&A 1999) by Anthony Burton, Merchants & Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Holt 1970) by Calvin Tomkins

Among works on the vexed matter of deaccessioning see A Deaccession Reader (Washington: American Association of Museums 1997) edited by Stephen Weil, John Merryman & Albert Elsen's 'Deaccession: Trading and selling works of art from permanent collections' in Law, Ethics, and the Visual Arts (Philadelphia: Uni of Pennsylvania Press 1987) and Adrian Babbidge's 1991 'Legal, decent and honest?' in 91(9) Museums Journal.






   next page  (works)