Stimulating

Felix Salmon calls for "a massive increase in federal arts funding."

Another Scream Sentence

The New York Times: "A man who admitted his role in the theft of the Edvard Munch painting 'The Scream' was sentenced Monday to two and a half years in prison by a court in Oslo .... The man, Bjoern Hoen, 41, had been found guilty by a Norwegian appeals court of providing the getaway vehicle that was used in the daytime heist. ... Last year, Norway’s Supreme Court sentenced one thief, Stian Skjold, to six years in jail and the getaway driver, Petter Tharaldsen, to 10 years and 6 months."

Charitable Deductions Update

The New York Times had a story today on the possibilities for paying for President Obama's health care proposal. It includes the following:

"Limit income-tax deductions for high earners. This is Mr. Obama’s main idea for raising revenue, but Congress is not likely to pass it except in a greatly scaled-down form.

"He proposed ... making taxpayers in the top income tax brackets ... deduct their mortgage interest, state and local taxes and charitable donations at the 28 percent income tax rate. Democratic leaders immediately objected that that would hurt charities, universities and other entities dependent on tax-deductible donations ....

"Mr. Obama has not given up. He counters that a 28 percent itemized deduction rate for top earners would be the same as under President Ronald Reagan. Just 1.4 percent of households would be affected, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center reported. The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University says charitable giving would decrease 2 percent.

"Any compromises would raise less revenue than Mr. Obama proposed. One alternative would exempt charitable contributions from the 28 percent limit. That, however, would provoke governors from high-tax states or Realtors and bankers protective of the mortgage tax break to press for exempting the other categories as well.

"Another idea would maintain the [current] rates for itemized deductions after the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire in 2011 .... That would leave the current break for deductions unchanged, but prevent it from becoming relatively more generous when income taxes rise for affluent taxpayers.

"Even that fallback hit a wall in the Senate Finance Committee. The opposition of Senator Charles E. Grassley, the panel’s senior Republican, carries weight with Senator Max Baucus, the Democratic chairman from Montana, who is determined to produce a bipartisan bill. Both men say any tax increases or cost savings should come from the health sector."

"Let museums sell art if they must"

The editors of the Schenectady Gazette come out against the Brodsky Bill:

"Indeed, cultural institutions should only turn to [deaccessioning] as a last resort. But when it comes to selling a painting or similar asset to keep the doors open or pay the curator’s salary, they — like any other business — should have the right."

The Deaccessioning Blog says it "seems like the tide is turning on the anti-deaccessionists."

"I believe it ignores the dire realities that museums like the Albany Institute of History & Art face every day"

Move over, Hugh Davies. Move over, Richard Armstrong. Here comes Christine Miles, director of the Albany Institute of History & Art, writing in opposition to the Brodsky Bill in the Albany Times Union:

"Does it make any sense to prevent the deaccessioning of works which then won’t be enjoyed by the public because the institution that houses it can’t afford to keep its doors open? I don’t think so. Yes, the public interest in making these works available to the people must be preserved, but not at the expense of the organizations who provide the stewardship necessary to do so."

Debating Deaccessioning II

I have a piece in the summer issue of The Art Newspaper on deaccessioning. It should all sound pretty familiar to regular readers of the blog, but it was nice to have the opportunity to lay out some of the arguments in a more sustained way and for a different audience. (Quick, somebody get Assemblyman Brodsky a subscription!) An excerpt:

"In fact, however, the best of the LACMA works were bought by a London dealer, and all 18 Orange County works went to a single unnamed private collector. Similarly, most of the Montclair works are ending up in private hands, no longer part of the 'public trust.' Nevertheless, the AAMD ultimately blessed each of these transactions on the simple grounds that the resulting proceeds will be used for acquisitions (someday). From the AAMD’s perspective, it’s perfectly fine for a museum to raid its collection and sell work, just so long as the proceeds are put into an account labeled 'acquisitions'—even if the particular acquisitions have yet to be identified, and even if it just so happens, by happy coincidence, that having the money sit in that account helps satisfy the museum’s bond covenants. But selling the same work, for other valuable museum purposes (improving education, upgrading facilities, staying open more hours, reducing admission fees, saving jobs, etc), is never, ever, under any circumstances okay. Unless you define the public interest as 'keeping ever more art in storage at more museums' it’s hard to see how the public benefits from this state of affairs."

More on the "Secret" Schoeps Settlement

A pair of posts from Mark Durney.

"Who is this 'public' we keep hearing about?"

The Deaccessioning Blog on this morning's NYT story on the Brodsky Bill.

"A perfect mess with a long, dismal aftermath"

In this week's Time, Richard Lacayo looks back on the 20th anniversary of the "Mapplethorpe Wars," including the criminal obscenity trial in Cincinnati: "Make no mistake, the battle over Mapplethorpe resulted in sustained harm to arts funding in the U.S."

It's Back

"US Copyright Register Marybeth Peters told Intellectual Property Watch that orphan works legislation is expected to be introduced within the next 10 days."

A bunch of posts from the last go-round here.

Brodsky Bill Update

Robin Pogrebin has the latest in the New York Times. She mentions the June 1 letter from "more than a dozen major cultural institutions" (including the Met, MoMA, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney) pleading with legislators to slow down. But Brodsky is unmoved: "the problem of deaccessioning is real and growing" and "the need for action is immediate."

"Is it a crime, or is it art?"

The Christian Science Monitor on the "Barrel Monster."

The Long and short of it (UPDATED)

The big news just before the weekend was that the city of Long Beach was, according to an LA Times headline, "threatening" the Long Beach Museum of Art with the "sale of artwork."

According to the Times, the city owns the museum and 1,400 works of art acquired prior to 1985. In 1999, the museum borrowed money for construction of a new two-story exhibition pavilion. The city agreed to be responsible for the bond debt if the museum couldn't pay it back. Now, with the "chronically deficit-ridden" museum apparently unable to pay off the debt, and the city's own budget deficit at around $20 million, one city councilman was quoted as saying "all options will remain on the table until the bond is paid off."

LA Times art critic Christopher Knight zoomed right past repulsive to "Stalin-esque."

The Deaccessioning Blog says "if this doesn't prove my point I don't know what will. Any institution that is 'critically deficit-ridden' should undergo a radical evaluation and transformation, even if closure is the answer."

I want to make a different, more narrow point, and that is that it seems to me the "public trust" argument completely breaks down in a situation like this, where it is the city itself which owns the museum and therefore it is the public, acting through their democratically elected representatives, that seems to be pushing for the sale.

That's assuming anyone is really pushing for the sale. A later story in the Contra Costa Times quotes a city official as saying: "That certainly would be a last resort as far as we're concerned. What we said is that everything is on the table, but selling art is certainly the last option." The story continues:

"The solution of selling off art was the focus of an article in the Los Angeles Times on Friday. 'We're actually a little surprised by the article because we only met with [the museum's executive director] and one of his board members once,' said [the city official]. 'The building (presently owned by the museum foundation), taking over the art (half is owned by the city, half by the foundation) or replacing the foundation and bringing in another entity who can manage the museum - all of those are preferred options. ... The museum really hasn't presented us with any offers at this point. This is in part some of our frustration. We are open to any suggestions or ideas that the museum might have. It's just that they haven't been forthcoming. And so we're now kind of down to the wire where we don't have a whole lot of time left to explore these options."

UPDATE: The Art Market Monitor: "Is Long Beach a Dictatorship?"

"In fact Kinkade has — justly — won the vast majority of the lawsuits which have been brought against him"

Felix Salmon says Thomas Kinkade is "bad, not evil": "The store owners ... lost money when ... the internet made secondary-market values of Kinkade’s work much more transparent. Suddenly, the enormous growth in past Kinkade sales was no longer a good thing: there were a lot of Kinkades to go around, and many of the buyers were people who bought on the assumption that their paintings would increase in value and they could make money on their investment. Up until the arrival of the internet, that worked for Kinkade, whose company set the prices for all his paintings and would raise them steadily. After the arrival of the internet, a whole industry arose buying and selling Kinkades at market-set, rather than Kinkade-set, prices. And that was the end of the success days for the company: without monopoly pricing power, Kinkade was nothing. The stores failed, ultimately, not because Kinkade treated them badly, and not because other stores were undercutting them. The stores failed because Kinkades are a commodity, and anybody wanting to buy one could get a second-hand Kinkade online at a much lower price than that charged at retail. Buyers no longer believed that their paintings would increase in value, so they bought fewer than they used to. And when they did buy, they were likely to buy already-existing Kinkades rather than new ones."

"People can interpret them differently, but we did nothing outside the AAMD guidelines"

The LAT's Mike Boehm spoke with Orange County Museum of Art director Dennis Szakacs, who, as far as I can tell, is the first museum director to come under fire for not following the Ellis Rule.

"Judge Slams MoMA, Guggenheim on Secret Holocaust Art Agreement"

That's a headline from Bloomberg today. A few notes:

1. The slamming in question took place in March. (Here's a NYT story at the time.) I'm not sure why it's news today. I guess the hook for the story is that the decision "has become the talk of the Holocaust restitution community."

2. I'm not sure why Judge Rakoff was so upset with the museums. The settlement, including a confidentiality provision, was reached on Feb. 2, the morning the trial was to have started. Judge Rakoff's written order notes that on March 6 he "directed the parties to submit letters stating whether they object to making the settlement agreement public and setting forth the grounds for any such objection. By letter that same day, the Museums informed the Court that they no longer had an objection to making the settlement terms public and that they were prepared to waive the confidentiality provision." It was the plaintiffs who refused.

3. It's worth pointing out that, despite the slamming, the Court left the confidentiality in place. As the order noted, "the Second Circuit strongly endorses the confidentiality of settlement agreements in virtually all cases." Allowing parties' to keep their agreements confidential encourages settlement, and there is a public interest in settlement of litigation.

4. Last, it's not clear why Judge Rakoff thinks it would be in the public interest to make this settlement (more) public. We already know the museums paid some money to the plaintiffs, and we also know the paintings will remain with the museums. Why do we need to know how much money the plaintiffs got? Why is that a matter of great public interest?

More on the Picasso Sketchbook Theft

Art Theft Central's Mark Durney on the recent theft from the Picasso Museum in Paris: "Its astonishing that given the desirability of works of art by Picasso and the tremendous sums of money the Picasso Museum has spent on sketches in the past that they would not have better security measures implemented protecting such a significant part of their collection." He's also not convinced the sketchbook would be "as difficult to sell as many have been led to believe."

Change of Heart

Back in December, U.S. District Court Judge A. Howard Matz said Clint Arthur's action against Louis Vuitton "appears to be a misguided lawsuit."

In April, a California state court judge dismissed a similar suit, calling it a "prime example" of "opportuntistic litigation."

Yesterday Matz decided that appearances can be deceiving and denied Louis Vuitton's motion to dismiss. The LAT's Mike Boehm has the details.

Kinkade Loss

The San Francisco Chronicle: "A federal appeals court has some dark news for the self-described 'Painter of Light,' Thomas Kinkade - it has restored an arbitration panel's $2.1 million award to two former gallery owners who say Kinkade's company duped them into investing their life's savings in a doomed enterprise. A federal judge in San Francisco overturned the [arbitration] panel's decision in 2007 .... On Tuesday, however, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the company 'received a fair hearing from the arbitrators' and must pay $860,000 in damages to the former gallery owners ... and more than $1.2 million in attorneys' fees and arbitration expenses."

"Once it's accessioned into the collection, it cannot be deaccessioned unless it does not fit the museum's defined mission" (UPDATED)

Art in America's Stephanie Cash interviews NY Assemblyman Richard Brodsky about the Brodsky Bill.

UPDATE: Picking up on Brodsky's remark that "if we don't do this, there will be institutions that cannibalize their collections in order to stay open, and you'll end up with paintings being sold to keep the doors open, and eventually institutions with open doors and no paintings," the Deaccessioning Blog says: "I suppose Mr. Brodsky would rather have paintings sitting in open air and beneath falling rain due to a forced eviction."