Art in the Time of (Economic) Crisis

An unexpected outcry from the media, philanthropic community, art world and university students erupted when Brandeis University announced plans last January to close its famous Rose Art Museum and sell its 7,000-piece art collection worth $350 million. The school’s board of trustees had determined that the sale was necessary to compensate for a declining endowment in the wake of the recession and the fallout from the Madoff debacle. Stinging criticism appeared in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. The Rose family, the museum building’s benefactors, decried what it called a planned “plundering” of the museum. “Arts go first whenever there’s a crisis,” says David Robertson, president of the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries.

The crisis put Brandeis center-stage in an ongoing debate about the function and intrinsic worth of art. “No matter how high its market value, a piece of art is not a quantifiable asset,” says Michael Rush, director of the Rose Art Museum since 2005, who had no part in the decision to sell the collection. The museum is part of the university’s central mission to advance “the humanities, arts and social, natural and physical sciences” and it is as “important to the school as its library,” said several Brandeis alumni now prominent in the art world. Museum art collections, they said in a February statement, are “held in trust for future generations of students and for the public at large;” they “must never be treated as financial assets to be liquidated as expediency and cyclical financial conditions dictate.”

At the other end of the spectrum, John McNamara, director of development at Illinois’ Rockford College, sees art holdings as disposable commodities, like an institution’s other tangible assets. He categorizes his school’s 2006 auction of 2,000 pieces of art as “asset redeployment,” similar to Rockford’s sale of donated land in the 1980s and rare books in 2007 to pay off debts and keep the school running.

Brandeis, however, is subject to stricter standards because its art collection is part of a museum while Rockford’s is not. The 190-member North American Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) expects all art museums, including those owned by universities, to follow professional—although not legally binding—guidelines: “A museum director shall not dispose of accessioned [i.e., recorded in a museum’s collection] works of art in order to provide funds for purposes other than acquisitions of works of art for the collection.” Art should be sold only if it doesn’t fit the mission of the museum; profits must be used to purchase art that does. This was the case, for example, when Rush arranged the multimillion-dollar sale of American impressionist Childe Hassam’s 1911 “Sunset at Sea,” two years ago. The Rose’s mission is to collect modern and contemporary art, he explains, and the rarely displayed Hassam painting was from the wrong end of the century.

Some criticize Brandeis as much for its abrupt announcement of the Rose arts sales and the museum’s closing as for the decision itself. Rockford College’s art sale garnered very few complaints, says McNamara, because the college approached the matter in a “sensitive and collaborative way.” In contrast, immediately after Brandeis’ announcement, faculty, museum employees and students complained about being left out of the discussion. As Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz put it later, “I screwed up” in not engaging “the Brandeis community in the deliberations that led to the board’s decision.”

In response to the furor, Brandeis hired a public relations firm, whose president Joe Baerlein says that Brandeis never wanted to actually close the museum, just to turn it into “a teaching and exhibition gallery.” Eliana Dotan, a Brandeis senior majoring in art history and chair of the Rose Museum’s student committee, likens such a gallery to an office lobby with paintings on the walls. She also challenges Reinharz’s claim that the museum had “little foot traffic”—an implied justification for its proposed closure that, according to The Los Angeles Times, has generated an attendance spike. In fact, says Dotan, events at the museum attract—and entice—students “who wouldn’t otherwise be there,” including an annual dance that draws a crowd of 500; many return after the events to study the paintings. Besides, she says, “I have never used the biology lab. That doesn’t mean we should close it.”

In mid-March, Brandeis formed a new group, the Rose Committee, composed of students, faculty, alumni, trustees and museum representatives, to discuss “the future vision of the museum within the larger context of Brandeis University.” The committee, however, has stated that its function is limited to recommending “ways for the Rose to continue to play a vital role” in the university’s mission. And recently published reports from the Rose Museum confirm widely circulated rumors that all museum staff will lose their jobs as of June 30.

This is not the first time Brandeis has raided its art collection. In 1991, in an incident that elicited limited criticism, the university auctioned off 14 works of “pre-modern” art through Christie’s, earning $3.5 million, most of which went into general funds, according to New York Times and Boston Globe reports.

Brandeis is not the only university to run into trouble with its plans to sell donated art to address financial needs. Tennessee’s Fisk University, for example, is embroiled in a lawsuit over its efforts to sell paintings donated by Georgia O’Keeffe. It hasn’t been able to afford to display them since 2005. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the legal guardians of the artist’s estate, sued the university for violating the donor’s original intent for the public to see the art; the case is still unresolved.

Sales such as those proposed by Brandeis and Fisk have led to efforts to put teeth into the art museum ethical code by devising a method to tie a school’s accreditation to having “deliberate exigency plans in place” for economic downturns. Other long-term repercussions are also possible, says Leslie Lenkowsky, an Indiana University professor of public affairs and philanthropic studies. Donors may put “more restrictions on their gifts,” he says. “The motto used to be, ‘buyer beware.’ Now, it’s ‘philanthropist, beware.’”

Be it gifts of money or specific art objects, giving involves trust. “The more strings attached…the less trust,” Lenkowsky says, and “trust is not what it used to be.” At the same time, Lenkowsky recognizes that donor restrictions bind the hands of governing boards and make it difficult for them to manage their institutions. As an example, he cites Albert Barnes, the benefactor of Pennsylvania’s Barnes Museum, who “was at war” with the Philadelphia Art Museum. When he died in 1951, he deliberately left his vast collection to Lincoln University with directions that the school maintain his original unconventional display. By 2004, the Barnes Foundation could no longer support housing the entire collection. Lincoln, which had been prevented by the AAMD code from selling any of the art in the Barnes Museum to maintain the facilities, agreed to move the collection to a new building scheduled to open in 2011—a part of the Philadelphia Art Museum.

Following what Lenkowsky calls the “life-is-uncertain principle,” the Barnes case exemplifies how a donor’s intentions may not be perpetually sustainable. Museums are not alone in considering the monetary value of aesthetic objects: The recession and Bernard Madoff’s misdeeds have set off a flurry of sell-offs of art and other memorabilia in venues ranging from eBay to high-end auction houses.

Art lovers may argue that our intellectual heritage should be above the financial fray, but in the struggle between art and survival, art may not always be the victor.—Joan Alpert