A Seismic Shift in the Landscape in Los Angeles

When Chelsea dealer Oliver Kamm (a favorite neighbor of ours and one of the very sweetest people you'll meet in the art world) announced he was changing his operations from a public gallery to private dealing, he was quoted on artnet.com :

"I’m happy," he said, noting that his last two shows had both been positively reviewed in the New York Times, resulting in no (as in zero) sales. "We are truly living in a post-critical era," he said.

I asked a high-profile art critic about that a while later at a party. I had the tables turned on me when asked what I thought Oliver meant by that. "Well," I explained, "I feel it means that whether or not an artist receives rave reviews is no longer anywhere near as important to their eventual success (with a road to inclusion in museums being the ultimate prize) as whether their work is popular among the right collectors." In other words, the power had shifted from critics to collectors. The art critic and I never resolved whether that was true at the party, but...

Further evidence of that shift in power, IMO, is the announcement by Los Angeles-based super-collector and philanthropist Eli Broad (rhymes with "road" [seen right]) that, despite having said as recently as a year ago he would give most of his collection away to museums, he had changed his mind and would instead maintain private control of his entire collection via a new lending foundation (i.e., he would lend his collection out to museums for exhibitions). Calling his decision nothing less than a new "paradigm for the way museums in general collect art" (as reported in The New York Times), Broad explained:

“I think it’s a new model that makes sense for other collections,” he said. “If it was up to me, I believe that museums ought to own works jointly.” Mr. Broad encouraged that practice last year with his purchase of a work by the artist Chris Burden, which he then gave jointly to the county museum and another Los Angeles institution, the Museum of Contemporary Art, where he was a founding trustee.

His decision not to donate his holdings evolved over the last year, Mr. Broad said, as his collection grew, and it became clear that no museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art included, would commit to placing a large percentage of the works on permanent exhibit.

That all seems rather practical. That is until you know that

The decision is a striking reversal by Mr. Broad, who as recently as a year ago said that he planned to give most of his holdings to one or several museums.

Long assumed to be at the top of the list of potential recipients was the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which next month is to open the $56 million Broad Contemporary Art Museum, a building designed by Renzo Piano and financed by Mr. Broad, as the centerpiece of its redesigned campus on Wilshire Boulevard.

Coming on the eve of the opening, the decision is a potential embarrassment for the Los Angeles museum. It was widely criticized in 2001 for mounting a major exhibition of works from Mr. Broad’s collection without having secured a promised gift of the works, an act that is prohibited at many prominent art institutions because it can increase the market value of the collection.

Even if you agree with Mr. Broad's vision, it's tough to accept that his timing wasn't meant to send shivers down the spines of museum directors.

So what's really happening here? What is this seismic shift? Well, the old paradigm held that museums had to seriously court collectors in hopes of securing their holdings one day. Even though this demanded a degree of obsequiousness on the part of the institution, the potential prize was considered well worth it. The better the museum's collection became, the more power they attained to attract even better collections, etc. etc. Because of the pressure to get certain collections, some museums have gone as far as to...as Tyler Green so wonderfully puts it..."fluff" powerful collectors (i.e., flatter them with an exhibition of their collection without a promised gift). As Tyler explains here, this is an ethical issue:

Couldn't be much simpler, says Geoff Edgers in the Boston Globe: MFA Boston gives collector show of collection. Collector rides the wave and sells collection. Christie's admits that exhibit contributes to interest in work shown. (Climax = sale.) MFA Boston's museo-peers say it committed a major ethical transgression.

Ah, but...you might say, if Broad's model becomes the norm, then museums won't need to fluff collectors anymore. That would be true if Broad were under any obligation to lend his collection to any institution asking. But, of course, he's not:

Mr. Broad took pains to make clear that [LACMA] would be “the favored institution” when it came to loans from the Broad Art Foundation. “If it weren’t going to be favored, I wouldn’t have given it $50 million to build the building,” he said.

The director of LACMA, Michael Govan, has said Mr. Broad did not profit from LACMA's 2001 exhibit of works from the Broad collection. (I'm assuming he means because Broad hasn't sold the work, not because the exhibition didn't add to the importance of the works' provenance.) But taking Mr. Broad out of the equation and simply looking at the model, it's not hard to see where a museum might feel just as pressured to fluff a lending collector as one who might donate the work eventually.

I'll admit there's a good deal to sort out in all this. The part of Broad's argument that I feel is rather compelling is this:

“We don’t want it to end up in storage, in either our basement or somebody else’s basement,” Mr. Broad said. “So I, as the collector, am saying, ‘If you’re not willing to commit to show it, why don’t we just make it available to you when you want it, as opposed to giving it to you, and then our being unhappy that it’s only up 10 percent or 20 percent of the time or not being shown at all?’”

Still, as Edward Wyatt (who wrote the Times piece) noted:

Of course Mr. Broad also enjoys tax advantages by keeping much of his artworks in a tax-exempt foundation that lends the work out to museums.

Then again, perhaps this model would backfire on other collectors (I can't see it backfiring on Broad, his collection is so deep and important he really can dictate any terms he wants). Perhaps some collectors with good, but not extraordinary, collections, though, would receive a little less attention from museums if they tried the same thing, leaving them with the less glamorous dilemma of selling off their collection eventually or struggling to make their own museum of it. The number of mediocre museums that might result in isn't any more enticing a scenario than an increase in fluff shows.

What does this mean for artists? Well, essentially it means that the ultimate prize may no longer be getting your work into a museum, but rather into a high-profile collection (i.e., so that it will be exhibited more frequently). The problem with that scenario, as I see it, is that whereas there's public pressure on museums not to deaccession work, there's no such pressure on private collectors. Therefore, there's more risk that one's work will end-up, not being preserved for posterity, but rather dumped at auction when the tides of fashion shift. Museums take a very long view of their holdings. It's hard to say what the long view for a lending foundation might be.