Can A Museum Die?
by Jeff Weinstein
FEBRUARY 2, 2009 TAGS:
When Brandeis University president Jehuda Reinharz and board members announced last week that they had decided to close their Rose Art Museum and sell its magnificent collection of postwar American art to subsidize a shrinking endowment and ease a growing debt, the outcry was immediate and impassioned.
Word spread rapidly in newspapers and on the net; hundreds of surprised undergrads gathered on campus to protest; artists and curators around the country voiced outrage. Even the usually docile American Association of Museums was “alarmed and dismayed.” How could the Warhols, Rauschenbergs, and de Koonings that were donated to serve as public boon and sources of enlightenment disappear without discussion or debate into lucky living rooms, never to be seen by students or visitors again?
And even if the museum did survive in some form, no one would contribute art or money after this, moaned its blindsided director, Michael Rush. (His statement of “shock and horror” at on the university’s own website is probably unprecedented.) In an interview for Bloomberg News, the agitated Rush said that the closing of the almost half-century-old Rose would be “like a death.”
Dramatic words. What does Rush mean? Can a museum, or any cultural institution, die? I’d like to propose that the answer is yes. But I don’t mean that a museum or concert hall dies merely when it goes out of business or the walls get knocked down. The core of my reasoning is personal. If the Rose and its art were to go, a serious part of me would mourn, and as far as I’m concerned, mourning is incontrovertible evidence that something alive and important has passed away.
Allow me to explain. In the early 1960s, I escaped from typical high-school misery in Queens, New York, by running away to Manhattan and hiding, usually among the paintings and sculptures of big museums. The Metropolitan, Modern, Guggenheim, and Whitney museums were free or almost so to anyone my age, and each provided a wondrous opportunity to become invisible. As it happened, faced with the gold and sapphire clots of van Gogh or the druggy lavender mists of Rothko, I managed to hide doubly, this time within the artworks themselves and the places they created in which I could be thoughtful, independent, and safe.
When I escaped to college in Waltham, Mass., ostensibly to study science, I found that I wanted to vanish once more. But my first visit to the Rose Art Museum, near my dorm, was not to look at art but to hear a concert of deep and dissonant sounds (by faculty composer Alvin Lucier). We few listeners sat not on theater seats but on cold floors, surrounded by spare and glinting art, and the word “impressionable” doesn’t completely capture why I was moved by the event toward a life-changing aesthetic curiosity that has only grown as I have aged.
And then there’s the bedroom. It must have been 1966, on a day I cut organic chemistry and instead walked through a show at the Rose of what was beginning to be called Pop Art. Suddenly I stopped, at what looked like a fantasy motel room. The sleek and contemporary bed, bureau, table, and fur pillows were off -- constructed at slightly wrong angles and sizes, shaped into nightmare rhombuses and trapezoids. The installation appeared to be a drawing made three-dimensional, but without adjustments to perspective -- exactly, as it turns out, how artist Claes Oldenburg conceived and built his “Bedroom Ensemble.” The result was impossible to nail down: glamorous and airless, ominous and festive simultaneously.
I soon fell deeply in love with art, and years later, I became an art critic and editor of art critics. (I even fell in love with an art critic, whom I married.) That warped bedroom worked its wiles.
In fact, at Brandeis, the Rose Art Museum changed my life in a more profound manner than anything else I studied. Although various artworks may move a multitude of viewers in various ways, my experience wasn’t “any-art” generic. The Rose opened in 1961, and founding director Sam Hunter, previously at MoMA, acquired first-rate examples from first-rate creators and mounted exhibitions that few university venues would or could. The Rose is one of the only museums in the nation that specializes in contemporary art. Its collection now numbers about 7,200 and is estimated to be worth around $300 million.
Yet that estimate is cruelly optimistic. Last season’s auction results at Christie’s and Sotheby’s were worse than pallid. Even if it were ethically acceptable to sell (or “deaccession”) art from a museum collection for any reason other than to acquire more or better work, this would be a wretched time to try because the art market is so weak.
The sick economy is hurting cultural and educational institutions everywhere, and no one is saying that Brandeis doesn’t need money. But plucking the Rose is the wrong way to get it. St. Louis Post-Dispatch art critic David Bonetti, who lived across the hall from me in my second year at college, writes that the Rose set him on his professional path as well. He’s suspicious about the Brandeis deficit -- reported to be less than $80 million. Why dispose of so much work and shutter a museum that everyone agrees earns its keep when focused fundraising and budgeting would do the trick? “You don’t sell the timpani to save the orchestra,” a wry friend joked. Philistine panic is never a pretty sight.
Not all is lost. The Massachusetts attorney general is looking into the university’s plans to convert possibly restricted gifts into liquid assets, a Facebook campaign to save the Rose has started, and Reinharz hastily added that if the money picture improves, only some of the work will be let go. But, he said, the museum will still be closed.
So who will see the art that remains? Sounds like burying a body alive.
Selling a single piece of a museum’s art is almost never the right thing to do; breaking up a whole collection is wrong in ways that the Brandeis president and board apparently never considered. Museum collections, especially good ones, have taste “personalities” that make their piecemeal dissolution into private hands and vaults even more wanton and thoughtless.
To be sure, work is donated to museums for many reasons: vanity, tax benefit, and in some cases to increase the value of work by the same artist the donor already owns. Yet all that art was donated in public trust, ultimately to be seen by eyes unknown. A museum lives because it’s a place where art isn’t owned, but shared. When that stops, you might as well call the undertaker. It’s gone.
Word spread rapidly in newspapers and on the net; hundreds of surprised undergrads gathered on campus to protest; artists and curators around the country voiced outrage. Even the usually docile American Association of Museums was “alarmed and dismayed.” How could the Warhols, Rauschenbergs, and de Koonings that were donated to serve as public boon and sources of enlightenment disappear without discussion or debate into lucky living rooms, never to be seen by students or visitors again? And even if the museum did survive in some form, no one would contribute art or money after this, moaned its blindsided director, Michael Rush. (His statement of “shock and horror” at on the university’s own website is probably unprecedented.) In an interview for Bloomberg News, the agitated Rush said that the closing of the almost half-century-old Rose would be “like a death.”
Dramatic words. What does Rush mean? Can a museum, or any cultural institution, die? I’d like to propose that the answer is yes. But I don’t mean that a museum or concert hall dies merely when it goes out of business or the walls get knocked down. The core of my reasoning is personal. If the Rose and its art were to go, a serious part of me would mourn, and as far as I’m concerned, mourning is incontrovertible evidence that something alive and important has passed away.
Allow me to explain. In the early 1960s, I escaped from typical high-school misery in Queens, New York, by running away to Manhattan and hiding, usually among the paintings and sculptures of big museums. The Metropolitan, Modern, Guggenheim, and Whitney museums were free or almost so to anyone my age, and each provided a wondrous opportunity to become invisible. As it happened, faced with the gold and sapphire clots of van Gogh or the druggy lavender mists of Rothko, I managed to hide doubly, this time within the artworks themselves and the places they created in which I could be thoughtful, independent, and safe.
When I escaped to college in Waltham, Mass., ostensibly to study science, I found that I wanted to vanish once more. But my first visit to the Rose Art Museum, near my dorm, was not to look at art but to hear a concert of deep and dissonant sounds (by faculty composer Alvin Lucier). We few listeners sat not on theater seats but on cold floors, surrounded by spare and glinting art, and the word “impressionable” doesn’t completely capture why I was moved by the event toward a life-changing aesthetic curiosity that has only grown as I have aged.And then there’s the bedroom. It must have been 1966, on a day I cut organic chemistry and instead walked through a show at the Rose of what was beginning to be called Pop Art. Suddenly I stopped, at what looked like a fantasy motel room. The sleek and contemporary bed, bureau, table, and fur pillows were off -- constructed at slightly wrong angles and sizes, shaped into nightmare rhombuses and trapezoids. The installation appeared to be a drawing made three-dimensional, but without adjustments to perspective -- exactly, as it turns out, how artist Claes Oldenburg conceived and built his “Bedroom Ensemble.” The result was impossible to nail down: glamorous and airless, ominous and festive simultaneously.
I soon fell deeply in love with art, and years later, I became an art critic and editor of art critics. (I even fell in love with an art critic, whom I married.) That warped bedroom worked its wiles.
In fact, at Brandeis, the Rose Art Museum changed my life in a more profound manner than anything else I studied. Although various artworks may move a multitude of viewers in various ways, my experience wasn’t “any-art” generic. The Rose opened in 1961, and founding director Sam Hunter, previously at MoMA, acquired first-rate examples from first-rate creators and mounted exhibitions that few university venues would or could. The Rose is one of the only museums in the nation that specializes in contemporary art. Its collection now numbers about 7,200 and is estimated to be worth around $300 million.
Yet that estimate is cruelly optimistic. Last season’s auction results at Christie’s and Sotheby’s were worse than pallid. Even if it were ethically acceptable to sell (or “deaccession”) art from a museum collection for any reason other than to acquire more or better work, this would be a wretched time to try because the art market is so weak.
The sick economy is hurting cultural and educational institutions everywhere, and no one is saying that Brandeis doesn’t need money. But plucking the Rose is the wrong way to get it. St. Louis Post-Dispatch art critic David Bonetti, who lived across the hall from me in my second year at college, writes that the Rose set him on his professional path as well. He’s suspicious about the Brandeis deficit -- reported to be less than $80 million. Why dispose of so much work and shutter a museum that everyone agrees earns its keep when focused fundraising and budgeting would do the trick? “You don’t sell the timpani to save the orchestra,” a wry friend joked. Philistine panic is never a pretty sight.Not all is lost. The Massachusetts attorney general is looking into the university’s plans to convert possibly restricted gifts into liquid assets, a Facebook campaign to save the Rose has started, and Reinharz hastily added that if the money picture improves, only some of the work will be let go. But, he said, the museum will still be closed.
So who will see the art that remains? Sounds like burying a body alive.
Selling a single piece of a museum’s art is almost never the right thing to do; breaking up a whole collection is wrong in ways that the Brandeis president and board apparently never considered. Museum collections, especially good ones, have taste “personalities” that make their piecemeal dissolution into private hands and vaults even more wanton and thoughtless.
To be sure, work is donated to museums for many reasons: vanity, tax benefit, and in some cases to increase the value of work by the same artist the donor already owns. Yet all that art was donated in public trust, ultimately to be seen by eyes unknown. A museum lives because it’s a place where art isn’t owned, but shared. When that stops, you might as well call the undertaker. It’s gone.
RELATED CONTENT
Latest News Delivered to Your Inbox - Sign up with our site and you will get the latest news about people and subjects that interest you.
