shining a light on the shadowy fine art industry
Helen Pashgian, “Untitled” (1968). Image credit: MCA San Diego.
For all the bile-spewing and garment-rending over a possible new art market bubble, the froth may have a silver lining, even for the most committed art purists.
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Scott Reeder, “Real Fake” (2013). Image credit: Art Basel.
Beginning next week, London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery will use its exhibition space as the venue for the art world’s most thought-provoking amateur detective investigation. In collaboration with multi-disciplinary artist Doug Fishbone, the museum will open Made In China, a show consisting of 269 of the 270 pieces in the Gallery’s permanent collection–plus one unlabeled fake, commissioned from a Chinese painting “replicator."
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Cy Twombly, “Poems to the Sea” (1959). Suite of twenty-four works on paper. Image credit: Art and Artifice.
In Part 1 last week, I offered up two scenarios in which a defender of deaccessioning could try to claim the incentives for her chosen tactic made sense. The first involved selling off assets that were secretly toxic - in effect, a kind of insider trading. The second involved selling off a surplus of a single artist in order to diversify the museum’s collection. The former situation was highly improbable, bordering on impossible; the latter ricocheted unintended negative consequences back onto the museum.
I want to spend this second installment digging into why deaccessioning makes little sense from the standpoint of art economics, mainly on the basis of market value. To do that, we need to dissect the particularities of the Dia scandal. One artist and one work in particular provide the clearest view.
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Kenneth Anger. Still from “Invocation of My Brother Demon” (1972). Image credit: From the Barrelhouse.
If you follow art news, deaccessioning has been a hot topic in the past year - most prominently as a part of the fiscal and ethical morass that is the city of Detroit’s bankruptcy. In standard English, “deaccessioning” means the official removal of an owned artwork from a museum’s permanent collection, usually for the purposes of sale. Months passed with the very real possibility that the Detroit Institute of Arts’ might be coerced into deaccessioning multiple works to raise funds to help resurrect the city from the rare hell that is chapter 9.
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MoMA Concept Rendering: View from 53rd St. Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Image credit: Vulture.
On Monday morning, the eminent New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz dipped his pen in poison and penned a searing open letter to MoMA imploring the museum to halt its controversial expansion plans. For anyone who hasn’t been following the story, those plans include the imminent demolition of the American Folk Art Museum (owned by MoMA), which would be replaced by new structures from starchitects (and modernist punctuation champions) Diller Scofidio + Renfro, most recently lauded in NYC for their redevelopment of Lincoln Center.
More details on the MoMA proposal, including images, can be found here. For the purposes of this post, I think it’s fair enough to define the new art exhibition spaces as slick glass boxes. This even includes the sculpture garden, which would actually go one step further than the enclosed structures by leaving one side completely open to West 54th Street. The intention is for passersby to be able to walk right into the sculpture garden, spontaneously and gratis, rather than paying an admission fee for access to what would traditionally be a walled-in area.
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