Felix Salmon

I’ve been catching up on the art blogs this slow news day, which means catching up on a long and sometimes confusing debate about deaccessioning which was sparked by the sale of two paintings by New York’s National Academy. Ground zero for this debate is Donn Zaretsky’s Art Law Blog, but a lot of big names have been drawn in, including David Ross, the former director of both the Whitney and SF MoMA, who has been commenting chez Richard Lacayo.

Ross and Lacayo talk of a museum collection as an accretion of curatorial decisions: "museums collect most heavily when trustees and other donors are prospering," says Lacayo, adding that "in any given period a museum collection is a combination of available funds plus curator/director taste."

But that’s not really true at all. While there are isolated cases of generous benefactors leaving large amounts of cash to art museums, as Leonard Hanna did in Cleveland or David Rockefeller did in New York, most of the time it’s private collectors who do the acquiring, rather than institutions. The institutions then collect the collectors, and persuade them to leave all or part of their art to the museum.

As a result, most museums have large quantities of art that none of their directors ever particularly wanted, which ended up in their collection thanks to some bequest or other, and which will, realistically, never be shown. Even if such art is sold to a private individual it will still be seen by more people than if it’s kept in a basement somewhere. And if the sale conforms to Adrian Ellis’s proposed rule, I don’t see any downside at all. Here’s the rule:

You can deaccession and spend the money on whatever you want – a new roof, working capital, education programs, or even a boffo night out with your chums on the board — provided that you ensure that the institution or individual to whom you sell commits in some binding form to equal or higher conservational standards and equal or higher public access.

It’s a bit like a Creative Commons license for art, and it seems like a great idea to me. Consider the Eakins which once belonged to the National Academy and now belongs to LACMA: this is a classic positive-sum bargain which benefits both institutions and the general public.

Ellis’s rule even provides something of a bridge to Tyler Green, who’s very much on the side of the no-deaccessioning absolutists. Writes Green:

If an institution, such as the National Academy or someone else, can’t operate effectively enough to stay open, it should close. Then it should disperse its collection to non-profit institutions — to other museums. This way art collections held in a public trust remain held in a public trust.

If the National Academy were to adopt Ellis’s rule, then the worst-case scenario would effectively be what Green is talking about here: it keeps on selling off its collection to other museums until there’s nothing left. On the other hand, if such sales manage to keep the institution alive and thriving, attracting new artists who donate valuable examples of their own work, then we end up at a place which is unambiguously better than closing. As Zaretsky says, "meet Mr. Pareto".

I do, however, have sympathy for Green’s idea that selling off a permanent and irreplaceable part of your bequest in order to meet temporary liquidity needs is generally a very bad idea. Which is why it might be good to have some kind of "uptick rule" in place as well, which makes it much easier for flush, successful museums to deaccession than those who are in desperate financial straits. The best time to sell off extraneous art is when the market is hot, when donors are giving you and other museums lots of money, and when you can deaccession in a considered and strategic manner. The worst time to sell art is when you need to plug a fiscal hole, the market has tanked, and you flail around to find the most valuable paintings in your collection.

In any case, I do hope that this debate makes it out of the blogosphere and into the realm of the Association of Art Museum Directors, whose prissy fatwa on the National Academy is a classic example of rules-based rather than principles-based silliness. With a bit more imagination and a bit less ideological fervor, everybody in the museum world, including the all-important general public, could benefit.

Update: Lacayo asks whether "a standard of ‘equal or higher public access’ to a work of art mean that institutions in large cities could only sell to institutions in cities of roughly the same size". That’s easy: No, it doesn’t. Public access means the number of members of the public who actually see the work in question: if the work is permanently in storage, that number is zero. And it’s entirely possible that even if the work is on show, more people will see it at a big museum in a small town (like Crystal Bridges) than at a small museum in a big town (like the National Academy).

Remember those furtive seller’s rebates from auction houses? Georgina Adam says that in at least one instance they might have risen to include the entire buyer’s premium:

In some cases the whole of the buyer’s premium was given to the seller, as well as the vendor’s premium being waived entirely. This is believed to be the arrangement David Rockefeller made with Sotheby’s when he sold Mark Rothko’s 1950 “White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose)” for $72.8m (ߣ36.7m) in May last year.

If anybody can pull off that kind of negotiation, it would be David Rockefeller — good for him, for not only selling at the very top of the market, but also getting Sotheby’s to act as a middleman for free.

Adam goes on to say that there’s still uncertainty over the identity of the buyer of one of the most expensive paintings ever sold at auction:

The best known is the 2006 sale of Picasso’s 1941 “Dora Maar au Chat”, for which a buyer buried half way down Sotheby’s saleroom put in an unexpected and winning bid of $95.2m. The painting’s owner is believed to be Russian or Ukrainian, but nobody, even most of the people at Sotheby’s, knows for sure.

I thought it was pretty well accepted at this point that the buyer was Boris Ivanishvili — the chap who also famously spent $11.3 million on a Peter Doig in 2007. Ben Lewis and

Jonathan Ford, in their excellent article on the contemporary art bubble, even have the kind of details it’s hard to make up:

The Georgian Boris Ivanishvili spent $95m on Picasso’s Dora Maar au Chat–a work of art that he still hasn’t unpacked. When it was flown back to Tbilisi, the airport was closed down and the army turned out to ensure the work’s transfer to a secure warehouse.

I do hope though that the art press will pay attention to another of Adam’s points:

Estimates can be meaningless. Vendors’ expectations can be too high; the auction house may have agreed to an inflated estimate on one work in order to bag others. Alternatively, the estimate can be unrealistically low, to attract potential buyers. Proving the point, Christie’s buries this disclaimer in its conditions of sale: “Estimates of the selling price should not be relied on as a statement of the price at which the item will sell or its value for any other purpose.”

It would be great if reports on art auctions concentrated only on the final price including the buyer’s premium, and pretty much ignored both the hammer price and the estimate. Failing that, we should at least end the ridiculously silly practice of comparing the total amount spent at the auction to the sum of the low estimates in the auction catalogue — a truly apples-to-oranges comparison which sheds no light on anything. Estimates are like training wheels for the auction houses’ more unsophisticated buyers. They shouldn’t be needed by anybody qualified to report on the auctions.