Panel Summary: The Arts and Humanities in Public Life Conference 2000

Taking Funds, Giving Offense, Making Money: The Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy and the Dilemmas of Arts Policy

In an era of authoritarian politicians, questionable ethical and moral judgements, and dwindling public interest and funding, there is growing uncertainty that art exhibits will continue to be legally protected, politically supported and aesthetically uncompromised by market interests. A February 12, 2000 conference took the

A February 12, 2000 conference utilized the debate surrounding New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's decision to deny city funds for a contentious art exhibit in order to ponder fundamental questions of cultural policy.

debate surrounding New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's decision to deny city funds for a contentious art exhibit as a springboard to ponder fundamental questions of cultural policy. More than 400 academics, arts administrators, policy experts, and students joined the day-long Arts and Humanities in Public Life Conference, "Taking Funds, Giving Offense, Making Money: The Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy and The Dilemmas of Arts Policy," which was organized by the Cultural Policy Program¹ at the University of Chicago.

The specific controversy grew out of an exhibit, "Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection," and Mayor Giuliani's threat to cut off millions of dollars in city subsidies to the Brooklyn Museum of Art unless it canceled this exhibit. The controversy exploded when both sides filed lawsuits; the Brooklyn Museum of Art sued City Hall for cutting funds, citing protection under the First Amendment, while Giuliani claimed "Public taxpayer dollars should not go for aggressive desecration of national or religious symbols of great significance and sensitivity to people." As these cases made their way through the courts, offended citizens protested in front of the museum, and one iconoclast smeared white paint on the artwork most in dispute, while attendance at the museum soared. It soon emerged in the press that despite denials, the museum had funded the show in part by soliciting donations from those with a direct or indirect financial stake in its success -- dealers, auction houses, the collector himself -- raising questions of conflict-of-interest.

Through three panel presentations and a roundtable discussion, University of Chicago conference organizers examined this controversy from multiple perspectives:

• Legal issues surrounding the constitutional right to freedom of artistic expression;
• The struggle between arts administrators and public officials to control the art displayed in public cultural institutions;
• The cultural difficulty in defining and negotiating "rules of respect" for art that violates certain limits of propriety; and
• The ethical questions raised by the influence of money on art.

The latter perspective was the focus of the panel Shock Value: Market-Making For Controversial Art, which was moderated by John Brewer, the John and Marion Sullivan Professor of English and History, University of Chicago. The panelists included: Thomas Blackman, President, Thomas Blackman Associates, organizers of the annual Art Chicago exhibition; James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director, Harvard University Art Museums; Gilbert Edelson, Esq., Administrative Vice President and Counsel, Art Dealers Association of America; and Kimerly Rorschach, Dana J. Feitler Director, David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago.

John Brewer

Brewer led the panel's exploration of the peculiar relations between museums and the artists, dealers, and collectors who share an economic stake in exhibited art. Part of the story of the Brooklyn Museum is that it is a public-private hybrid. On one hand, it inhabits a public building owned by the City of New York; on the other hand, however, it is a private organization with a Board of Trustees that oversees its collections, exhibitions, and policies. Brewer suggests that this sort of hybridization of cultural institutions through public-private partnerships has resulted in a struggle over the management of funds, exhibitions, and art collections. To define where public interest stops and private interest begins is a tricky, increasingly complicated problem. Furthermore, Brewer asks, who speaks for the public and with what authority? The answer really has to do with the power of the art director to determine what art is exhibited and the way this power has been challenged.

The panel addressed such questions as: What is the role of the art institution in our society? What are the objectives of public arts funding? What policies should govern the relations between publicly funded museums and private art dealers? And what, if anything, should be done to ensure the public good is served by the working of this complicated market?

James Cuno: "Sensation" and The Ethics of Funding Exhibitions²

Museums today wish to increase their popularity for two reasons. First, higher attendance obviously generates greater revenue. But more importantly, argues Cuno, popularity confers legitimacy on the very enterprise of the museum. As public institutions museums must strive to deliver a valued public good to the maximum number of people at the lowest possible cost. Equal and easy access to culture and learning are the museum's goals; an increase in popularity indicates success in fulfilling that purpose.

According to Cuno museums necessarily mediate between the ambitions of the few, such as donors and arts experts, and the expectations of the many, the public at large. Not only do museums identify, interpret and distribute public values, but as public institutions they also embody certain values. The museum's authority to decide and distribute public values is conferred by the public and is based on the public's trust that professional experts employed by the museum will disinterestedly pursue these public-minded goals. Museum staff must recognize the interests and desires of its public and know how to present unfamiliar and challenging material to that particular audience.

With 'Sensation', Cuno believes the Brooklyn Museum violated this essential relationship of trust: first, by misunderstanding the public's expectations and second, by seeming to engage in a self-interested form of promotion which in turn undermined respect for the staff's professional expertise. If its intention in hosting 'Sensation' was to obtain legitimacy, the Brooklyn Museum ultimately failed through its association with Saatchi. This affiliation led many to feel that the museum had betrayed the public good by allowing private interest to dominate. Cuno is eager to note, however, that the presence of private collections and private funds is not inherently antithetical to the mission of public museums. On the contrary, they are frequently beneficial when they first and foremost support the primary mission and serve the public-minded programs of the museum.

Kimerly Rorschach, The Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy and the Art Museum Paradigm³

Rorschach proposes that the difficult issues raised by the Brooklyn Museum of Art controversy are closely related to the broader social, political, and economic changes of the past decade, as the world moved from the paradigm of cold war to that of globalism. Rorschach closely ties this development to the engines of a powerful world economy and new Internet communications. She suggests that art museums, adept as they have often been in finding new ways to fund their enterprise and attract larger audiences, have had difficulty coming to terms with these socio-political changes, despite the evolution of their broad mission from "collecting, preserving, and displaying art," to "bringing art and people together."

Museums have faced great difficulties as a result of the culture wars⁴ , including a dramatic decrease in federal funding for the arts. In addition to losing funding, art institutions have to face suspicions that museums can no longer function as authoritative cultural arbiters of visual art, and that artistic quality is perhaps impossible to define in a universal or absolute way. On the other hand, the last decade has also been one of great opportunity for art museums, at least partly because of the enormous growth of wealth, which has led to positive philanthropic trends and the creation of philanthropic foundations. The Internet has also brought new possibilities for communication and education to art museums. The funding issues raised in the Brooklyn controversy must be seen in this larger context of new challenges and opportunities. To adapt to this new environment, Rorschach believes museums might beneficially adopt some of the funding policies developed by universities trying to forge partnerships between public and private interests, such as required disclosure of interest statements. She points out that universities have also successfully defended the right to academic freedom and usefully employed decentralized management strategies.

Thomas Blackman
Blackman explores public trust in public arts institutions. He proposes that in the case of the Brooklyn Museum of Art's "Sensation" exhibit, this trust was undermined by the degree and intent of Mr. Saatchi's involvement, which included his choice of artworks, personal funding of the project, and aggressive intervention in the show's ultimate presentation. Blackman suggests that by granting control to Mr. Saatchi, the Brooklyn Museum might be seen as having taken liberties with the spirit, if not the letter, of standard museum practices. However, he argues, the Brooklyn Museum of Art ultimately decided that the value and impact of the show outweighed such concerns, and it believed it could maintain the appropriate control over the unique formula it had brought together.

Museums serve a variety of functions. Rather than serving as a preserve of historically significant material, Blackman argues, in this case the Brooklyn Museum of Art functioned as a laboratory. In this capacity, museums must rely on the public's trust, and seek the most daring conversations taking place in the contemporary art world. Using their expertise, museums should support these conversations and make them available to the public.

Gilbert S. Edelson, Some Sensational Reflections

The debate over the Brooklyn Museum of Art controversy has raised questions and concerns about the complex relationship among museums, their exhibitions, collectors and dealers, most especially those involving works of contemporary art. Edelson focused on the critiques of the exhibition that questioned the propriety of art from a private collection being exhibited in a public museum. Some critics argue that museums, as publicly supported scholarly institutions, should not exhibit private collections because such exhibitions confer a direct financial benefit on the owner of the works by enhancing their value. Edelson disagreed, arguing instead that a museum should decide whether or not to exhibit a private collection by weighing the importance of the collection. Does the collection have such quality and significance that the public interest would be served by making it available to a wide audience that might otherwise not see it? The overwhelming majority of private collections that have been shown in museums deserve to be exhibited because they meet those criteria.

On the other hand, Edelson also notes that some regional museums are now performing a type of community service by assuming the role of art dealer. In areas without commercial galleries, where contemporary artists lack opportunities to show and sell their work, museums have usefully substituted for dealers while simultaneously fulfilling their public-minded mission. In these instances public and private interests can coincide.

¹ The University of Chicago's Cultural Policy Program-an interdisciplinary initiative between the Division of the Humanities and the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies-aims to foster conversations between academic analysts of cultural issues and those struggling with these issues in the broader public arena. More information about the Cultural Policy Program may be found at: http://culturalpolicy.uchicago.edu.

² For more information, download a copy of the working draft, " 'Sensation' and The Ethics of Funding Exhibitions" by James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director, Harvard University Art Museums. http://humanities.uchicago.edu/artspublic/conf2000/cuno.html

³ For more information, download a copy of "The Brooklyn Museum Controversy and the Art Museum Paradigm" by Kimerly Rorschach, Dana Feitler Director, David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. http://humanities.uchicago.edu/artspublic/conf2000/rorschach.html

⁴ Rorschach cites the Mapplethorpe controversy. A planned Mapplethorpe exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC was cancelled because the content was thought to be pornographic and displaying it jeopardized the gallery's federal funding. For more information, see http://encarta.msn.com/find/Concise.asp?ti=00626000

⁵ For more information, download a copy of "Some Sensational Reflections" by http://humanities.uchicago.edu/artspublic/conf2000/edelson.html Gilbert Edelson, Esq., Administrative Vice President and Counsel, Art Dealers Association of America.