"There can be no denying the public benefit, both for the city of Philadelphia and the general public, of opening the collection to a wider audience"

Mark Lamster in The Architect's Newspaper: "Argott fails to engage or even acknowledge the two central questions the Barnes controversy (and his film) raises. First, why should reasonable people be forced to live with the intransigent intentions of a man who’s been dead for half a century? And second, might the Barnes collection actually be better off in a purpose-built museum in downtown Philadelphia, where it will be far more accessible to the general public, and a boon to that city’s teetering economy."

"Less a doc than a polemic"

Philadelphia Weekly: "[Argott] pushes his argument too hard—so absurdly hard, in fact, that the only sane response is to think it’s not really THAT big a deal. . . . [O]ne of the opening sound bites charges that the Barnes move is 'the biggest act of cultural vandalism since World War II.' Seriously? Barring a miracle, the collection will move 4.2 miles, into a building that will retain its owner’s eccentric layout .... THIS is tantamount to the Rape of Europa? ... The Art of the Steal is riddled with such hyperbole and fuzzy reasoning, and each instance pops yet another tiny hole in the collective argument. No one addresses the pros of the move—that more people would be able to see, say, Matisse’s Le bonheur de vivre, or that it would bring mucho tourism dollars to a city so cash-strapped it nearly closed its libraries. Such are the limitations of the polemic, which like its close cousin, propaganda, aims for the heart first and the head a distant second."

"Is it really 'a tragedy' that lots more people will get to see these paintings?"

Kyle Smith: "This documentary relies heavily on an echo chamber of art writers and teachers, all of whom are outraged by the proposed move, but their ad hominem snark ... and use of derision like calling the new museum 'McBarnes' are more revealing than the filmmakers suspect. The same neighbors are shown first complaining that the Barnes collection draws too much street parking, then fighting the addition of a parking lot, then fighting yet again to keep the collection where it is, where few can see it. Maybe the gentry and art-world snobs are less interested in the details of Barnes' will than in preserving a fabulous secret garden, away from the grubby public."

Linkage

• Lawsuit over Warhol painting.
• Law & Order, art-style.
• "Few Canadians give to the arts."
• Art crime exhibit.
• "The Guardian's report confirms a number of frequently discussed issues related to stolen art and ransoms."
  

Indictment in Clementine Hunter Case

The (La.) Independent Weekly reports: "A federal grand jury indicted three people for selling counterfeit Clementine Hunter paintings. William Toye, 78, and Beryl Ann Toye, 68, both of Baton Rouge, and 62-year-old Robert E. Lucky Jr. of New Orleans were named in a four-count indictment that charges all three defendants with mail fraud and conspiracy to commit mail fraud, acting U.S. Attorney Bill Flanagan announced Thursday."

Background here.

What if Barnes's Will called for one work to be deaccessioned every year on his birthday?

The Art Market Monitor:

"Many of the outraged opponents of the Barnes move point to his wishes. Call it donor intent. Any sensible construction of the idea of art as a public trust ... should find Barnes’s dictatorial constraints over the art long after his own death ... to be in conflict with the interests of the public."

"The distortions start with the film's title"

Lee Rosenbaum posts part one of her review of "The Art of the Steal." Some highlights:

• "No Barnes masterpieces have been 'stolen' ... There was no 'heist.' ... This intrastate transport of masterpieces is surely not 'the greatest act of cultural vandalism since World War II.'"
• "Perhaps the best metaphor for what happened to the Barnes is 'takeover': The institution fell into stronger hands after being seriously vitiated by mismanagement and further endangered by the then-hostile neighbors who, paradoxically, are now leading the charge to keep it in Merion."
• "Argott disingenuously told Eric Kohn of the Wall Street Journal that he 'went into this with a blank slate,' when in fact he received his assignment from executive producer Lenny Feinberg, a ... former Barnes Foundation student, who made it clear during the post-screening discussion on stage at the New York Film Festival that he was always intent on an exposé."
• "The strangest gaffe is the film's heavy reliance on Mark Schwartz for elucidiation of the legal case. Schwartz is identified in the film as an attorney for Montgomery County and the Friends of the Barnes. Unmentioned in the film (and perhaps unknown to Argott) is that both the County and the Friends got Schwartz off the case early---a result of various missteps (including arguments in court that provoked the judge to admonish him), as well as a payment dispute."

Not So Easy (UPDATE)

I went back and forth this summer with Peter Friedman over the Gaylord postage stamp fair use case. I said it was good example of the unpredictability of fair use decisions. Friedman said that was "ridiculous." Gaylord, he maintained, was an "easy case" of fair use.

Today the Federal Circuit ruled in the case: no fair use.

You can read the decision here.

UPDATED: Friedman reacts to the decision here.

More "Art of the Steal" Reviews

The New York Times:

"As its title suggests, 'The Art of the Steal' is nothing if not agenda-driven, having been paid for by a former foundation student, Lenny Feinberg, who — to quote the movie’s notes — 'initiated, funded and was intimately involved in the making of The Art of the Steal.’ . . . But while its bias enlivens the movie ... it eventually also weakens it. . . . That’s too bad because surely there are more nuanced arguments for the move than those found here, which could only strengthen the documentary, saving it from caricature. At times the fight comes across as a smackdown between art snobs who want to preserve Barnes’s right to exhibit his masterworks however he wanted because, well, he paid for them (a curiously underexamined refrain), and vulgarians who want to turn his patrimony into tourist bait .... What remains unanswered, finally, is the larger question of whether deep pockets ensure custodial rights forever."

The Philadelphia Inquirer:

"[A]s a narrative of the facts, it is as one-sided as a plaintiff's brief. Argott simplifies the institution's convoluted, colorful history into stark black and white, smearing villains and cheering heroes. . . . The bad guys are a shadowy 'cabal' of Philadelphia foundations ... conspiring to break Barnes' will and abduct his babies in order to exploit them purely for touristic purposes. The good guys are the Friends of the Barnes, a group that seeks to preserve the collector's babies as he intended, in the villa especially built for them. One would not know from the movie that the so-called bad guys' plan would keep the foundation's holdings intact, maintain its educational mission, and bring Barnes' underknown collection to a greater number of people. . . .

"[T]he second time Drexel professor Robert Zaller, a Friend of the Barnes, is heard insisting that the proposed move downtown is 'the greatest act of cultural vandalism since World War II,' you think: Really? Then the hard question emerges, not from the screen, but in the viewer's mind: Does moving this chronically underfunded collection from its suburban enclave, where there is limited visitor access, to an urban center where it will have a solid endowment and greater public access, constitute vandalism? This viewer answers no: not vandalism. Pragmatism, perhaps, but not vandalism. Rather than tell the whole story of how the Barnes move came about - a Dickensian saga of bad financial planning, worse management, endless lawsuits, and meddling NIMBYs - Argott's talking heads spin a unified conspiracy theory of how Philadelphia money and institutions always had it in for Barnes."

Not So Fast

I said yesterday that The Tennessean's report on the latest in the Fisk-O'Keeffe litigation -- under the headline "Door is left open for Fisk to sell Georgia O'Keeffe art," and complete with triumphant quotes from Fisk President Hazel O'Leary ("Those who wait long enough get good news") -- was a little premature.

Sure enough, today brings a very different headline: "Fisk deal to sell O'Keeffe art takes hit."

We learn that "the state attorney general is casting doubt on whether a sale could move forward as easily as Fisk officials had initially hoped." He issued a statement saying that "neither the university nor O'Keeffe's estate in New Mexico should be allowed to move the collection."

As I mentioned last summer, Fisk now has to prove that compliance with the terms of the gift has become "impossible or impracticable." The AG says that, "given Fisk's recent reaccreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, the university can no longer argue that the sale of the Collection is necessary to its financial survival."

Daniel Moore Appeal Dismissed

On a clerical error.

For background on what the appeal is about, see here.

Fisk Update

I think the headline on this story in The Tennessean ("Door is left open for Fisk to sell Georgia O'Keeffe art") is a little misleading. The Tennessee Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal of the intermediate appellate court's decision tossing the O'Keeffe Museum from the suit on standing grounds. It seems to me that leaves things where they were when that decision came down this summer, namely:

"As the NYT reports, Fisk 'must still win permission in a lower court to sell an interest in the collection.' And as Lee Rosenbaum points out, they may have gotten the O'Keeffe Museum out of the way, but Tennessee Attorney General Robert Cooper still needs to be dealt with, and he is on record as strongly preferring a solution 'that would allow the Stieglitz Collection to remain in Nashville on a full-time basis.'"

Though, as I pointed out last summer, there is some language in that decision that would seem to support Fisk's plan to sell a share of the collection to the Crystal Bridges Museum.

"No one seeing 'The Art of the Steal' will be left wondering where the filmmakers’ sympathies are"

There was a good story in Sunday's New York Times on "The Art of the Steal," which opens Friday in New York. The key point is one I've made here several times: the movie is a polemic; don't go in expecting even a remotely balanced presentation.

It notes that the project came to the director, Don Argott, "through a former Barnes student named Lenny Feinberg"; that "the title itself ... makes clear what [the filmmakers'] think transpired behind the scenes"; that "some" might describe the film's style as "heavy-handed"; and that "some members of the museum world who have seen the film have ... taken sharp issue with many of Mr. Argott’s conclusions and with the style in which they are presented."

I think Linda Eaton, director of collections at the Winterthur Museum, sums it up nicely: "The film obviously had a message that didn’t reflect the complexities of the issues."

Be forewarned.

More on the question of photographing public art

Peter Friedman has some thoughts on the public art copyright infringement lawsuit I mentioned a couple weeks ago here. He endorses the sentiment that "any scheme that involves paying to photograph seems antithetical to the public interest," and he also thinks the photograph at issue is a fair use "because [it] stands on its own as a creative work. [The photographer] has taken a work embedded in a sidewalk in front of a public building and made it into a beautiful image that evokes both dance and confusion in a world full of complicated instructions seemingly sending us in a myriad of different directions."

Justin Silverman of the Citizen Media Law Project (whose sentiment that paying to photograph is antithetical to the public interest Friedman endorses) has a more thorough analysis of the fair use issue, running through each of the four fair use factors that courts apply, and concluding that, "all in all, ... it's a hard call."

Turning back to the "public interest" question, though, I want to ask: what role does the fact that the work is public play in the analysis? Is it only antithetical to the public interest for artists who make public art to retain copyright to their work? What is it about public art that warrants keeping it "completely open to the public" (i.e., as lacking the same copyright protections that apply to other artworks)? Don't all the same issues regarding incentives to create apply in the case of public art? I just don't see the argument for treating Jack Mackie's sculpture here any differently than the way we treat any other work.

"Is title insurance a solution in search of a problem?"

At the Huffington Post, Daniel Grant takes a look at how art title insurance is faring. He points out that, when it first came on the market, "lawyers and those in the art trade heartily endorsed the concept" (well, not all of them), but now, "several years later, the opportunity to purchase artwork headache-free does not appear to have been picked up by many art collectors or dealers." He notes that the "policies are not inexpensive, costing between one and three percent of the value of the object, and the price is paid up-front, rather than in installments over the course of the policy." And he gets the following quote from Chubb's fine art manager: "the only people who want title insurance are the people who have an impediment to the title of something in their possession, and they are looking to transfer the risk to someone else."

I remain a skeptic.

Tradeoffs

The Boston Globe reports that "Brandeis University unveiled a series of cost-cutting proposals this afternoon that would eliminate about two dozen faculty positions, several undergraduate majors and graduate programs, and more than a dozen university-sponsored doctoral spots."

The proposals include "phasing out graduate degrees in anthropology, theater design and cultural production," and undergrads "will no longer be able to major in Italian studies and Hebrew, or minor in Yiddish, East European Jewish culture, and Internet studies."

So here's my question. If you knew that those jobs could be saved, and those academic programs kept intact, through the sale of a small number of artworks owned by the University, would you do it? Or is it more important that every single one of those works stays at Brandeis (rather than, say, another museum in Boston)? As I've said many times before (e.g.), what the "no deaccessioning for operating costs" rule does is prevent us from having to face those questions. It keeps us from having to think about the real-world costs of not selling. So again, it may be true that it's more important to have that 220th Eakins in storage than it is to have an anthropology department. But it seems to me that conclusion should have to be argued for, and not just assumed. (Brandeis philosophy professor -- and chair of the Future of the Rose Committee -- Jerry Samet made a similar point here.)

"Like an episode of 'Antiques Roadshow' gone horribly wrong"

The New York Post on a dispute over a $20,000 work by 18th century Scottish artist Sir Henry Raeburn.

"Why is copyright (suddenly) a hot topic for artists?"

Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento considers the question.

Next They'll Tackle the Nature of the Good

The Whitefish (Montana) Pilot: "Council looks at how to define 'artwork.'"

More on the Polaroid Sale

The Art Market Monitor poses some "unanswered Polaroid questions," citing A.D. Coleman's ongoing series of posts on the sale. (He's up to Update # 13.) Coleman links to a letter from the lawyer for the bankruptcy trustee, which says that two federal courts have "authoriz[ed] the sale of artwork free and clear of any and all liens, claims, encumbrances and interests of any kind whatsoever and the transfer of good, clear and marketable title," so I'm not sure where the (legal) controversy is.

Earlier post here.