State of the Art Market: Off the Walls
August 2008
You’re hitting me where I
hurt," says Tom Freudenheim, former assistant secretary for museums at the Smithsonian Institution. The Buffalo, N.Y., native still smarts over what went down at his hometown museum, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. In November 2006, the Albright-Knox, a small institution in a cash-strapped city with a noted modernist collection, issued an excited press release. It announced that the museum was about to "deaccession"—or sell off from its permanent collection—"antiquities and other historical works."
The statement included quotes from agents of Sotheby’s, who would be acting on the museum’s behalf by auctioning off more than 200 objects in public sales over the following year. One expert praised an Indian figure of the dancing god, Shiva, as "arguably the best example of its kind." A set of Chinese ceramics was "certain to spark competitive bidding, particularly from Asian collectors and mainland Chinese institutions." Then there was the bronze Roman statue "Artemis and the Stag," the highest-profile lot of all. Richard Keresey, worldwide head of antiquities at Sotheby’s, called it "among the very finest large classical bronze sculptures in America and the most splendid to appear on the market in memory. It would be a star in any of the great collections of the world, whether in a museum or private hands."
A star, that is, except at the Albright-Knox. Half a century after acquiring "Artemis and the Stag," the museum had decided to sell the masterpiece, along with dozens of other exceptional works, in order to raise money for its acquisition fund for modern and contemporary art. "I went ballistic," Freudenheim recalls, "so I wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal."
He took the Albright-Knox to task for "devoting more and more resources to acquiring large amounts of contemporary art, work about which the judgment of history—supposedly what museums are all about—is far from settled. Such acquisition policies may be acceptable, but not when done by getting rid of masterpieces whose importance has been validated by time and critical opinion and that provide a context for work in the present." The article fired the first salvo in what turned out to be a losing battle to stop the Albright-Knox sales.
In the end, the criticism might have helped the auctions, which saw windfall profits. These days, Louis Grachos, the director of the Albright-Knox who oversaw the deaccessioning, chuckles when asked about the irony of the situation, though he declines to comment on it. The final take for the auctions came to $68 million, more than four times the collective $15 million estimate. The Artemis alone went for $28 million to an anonymous European collector, who has now temporarily loaned it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. "I took my son to see it there last week," Grachos says. His acquisition endowment has swelled to $91 million, drawing $4 million annually, up from $1.1 million annually. He says he has already used some of the money to purchase work by Fred Sandback and Olafur Eliasson. He has said previously that he would like to use the funds to acquire works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Bruce Nauman, Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst.
"I was surprised by the intensity of the response," Grachos says of the vocal criticism from Freudenheim and others. "What was interesting is that so many people did not comprehend what the true mission of the gallery was. This was an institution to support and collect living artists." As for the long-term effect of the public debate over the auctions, he says, "Our membership was in decline before the deaccessioning; now we’re on the way up." However, he adds, such controversies "are not healthy for museums."
Just how unhealthy they are is up for debate. Robert Flynn Johnson, the former curator-in-charge at the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts in San Francisco, maintains that the Albright-Knox "traded old lamps for new, but they have also caused a sense of distress amongst potential donors, who don’t even tell the museum, ‘We were going to give our paintings to you, and now we’re not.’ They don’t know what they lost, because nobody informed them."
The statement included quotes from agents of Sotheby’s, who would be acting on the museum’s behalf by auctioning off more than 200 objects in public sales over the following year. One expert praised an Indian figure of the dancing god, Shiva, as "arguably the best example of its kind." A set of Chinese ceramics was "certain to spark competitive bidding, particularly from Asian collectors and mainland Chinese institutions." Then there was the bronze Roman statue "Artemis and the Stag," the highest-profile lot of all. Richard Keresey, worldwide head of antiquities at Sotheby’s, called it "among the very finest large classical bronze sculptures in America and the most splendid to appear on the market in memory. It would be a star in any of the great collections of the world, whether in a museum or private hands."
A star, that is, except at the Albright-Knox. Half a century after acquiring "Artemis and the Stag," the museum had decided to sell the masterpiece, along with dozens of other exceptional works, in order to raise money for its acquisition fund for modern and contemporary art. "I went ballistic," Freudenheim recalls, "so I wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal."
He took the Albright-Knox to task for "devoting more and more resources to acquiring large amounts of contemporary art, work about which the judgment of history—supposedly what museums are all about—is far from settled. Such acquisition policies may be acceptable, but not when done by getting rid of masterpieces whose importance has been validated by time and critical opinion and that provide a context for work in the present." The article fired the first salvo in what turned out to be a losing battle to stop the Albright-Knox sales.
In the end, the criticism might have helped the auctions, which saw windfall profits. These days, Louis Grachos, the director of the Albright-Knox who oversaw the deaccessioning, chuckles when asked about the irony of the situation, though he declines to comment on it. The final take for the auctions came to $68 million, more than four times the collective $15 million estimate. The Artemis alone went for $28 million to an anonymous European collector, who has now temporarily loaned it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. "I took my son to see it there last week," Grachos says. His acquisition endowment has swelled to $91 million, drawing $4 million annually, up from $1.1 million annually. He says he has already used some of the money to purchase work by Fred Sandback and Olafur Eliasson. He has said previously that he would like to use the funds to acquire works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Bruce Nauman, Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst.
"I was surprised by the intensity of the response," Grachos says of the vocal criticism from Freudenheim and others. "What was interesting is that so many people did not comprehend what the true mission of the gallery was. This was an institution to support and collect living artists." As for the long-term effect of the public debate over the auctions, he says, "Our membership was in decline before the deaccessioning; now we’re on the way up." However, he adds, such controversies "are not healthy for museums."
Just how unhealthy they are is up for debate. Robert Flynn Johnson, the former curator-in-charge at the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts in San Francisco, maintains that the Albright-Knox "traded old lamps for new, but they have also caused a sense of distress amongst potential donors, who don’t even tell the museum, ‘We were going to give our paintings to you, and now we’re not.’ They don’t know what they lost, because nobody informed them."
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