by Jon Lackman | 3 November 2009 | Museums
Former Northwestern University dean Rudolph H. Weingartner and Princeton University Art Museum director James Christen Steward duel in the pages of Inside Higher Ed over the Rose Art Museum.
… I said to myself “good for them” when reports first surfaced last winter that Brandeis intended to sell its collection of modern art, so that the considerable (envisaged) proceeds could support functions closer to the central goals of the university … I see a significant role for art museums on higher education campuses. But, with quite special exceptions, I see a very small pedagogic function for colleges and universities to own works of art, especially given the current cost and value of so many of them. I’d rather those museums were reclassified as galleries. To be sure, the provisions of deeds of gift must be scrupulously observed; but assuming that to be the case, let them sell their works of art if the funds thus gained will better serve the institutions’ educational mission … This month’s article in Inside Higher Ed quotes a task force formed by arts groups to figure out ways to avoid the next Brandeis as saying that campus museums should be regarded as “essential to the academic experience and to the entire educational enterprise.” But why should they be so regarded when, by my admittedly not systematic observations, most of those museums do nothing or very little to deserve to be so regarded?
… And why do we university museums so annoyingly feel the need to collect artworks, creating the inevitable drain on resources caused by those pesky stewardship requirements? I offer in answer a fundamental article of faith, that even in the digital age, the sustained engagement with original works of art necessary for teaching, research, and layered learning would be difficult if not impossible if we ceased to be collecting institutions and instead taught only from objects temporarily made available for exhibition … Like libraries that often also find themselves embattled in times of budget cuts (since typically neither museums nor libraries directly generate tuition streams), great university art museums are a “public good,” offering value and possibility to the whole of our university communities as well as to users from outside the walls of the ivory tower. That all university museums do not achieve this centrality of purpose — often, I suspect, for lack of adequate resourcing by their parent institutions in the perpetual fight against the perception that art represents a “luxury” in the logo-and data-centric university — is to be regretted.
Now seems as good a time as any to also belatedly catch up with Robert Storr’s April 2009 Frieze article on the matter:
… Word has it that Madoff’s chicanery cost several of Brandeis’s patrons a bundle, but the Rose costs the university nothing – much of its collection was bought for a song but is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars due to the market bubble Madoff helped to inflate. It is separately endowed, in the main self-supporting and even contributes to the larger institution’s budget. So what drove the trustees to make this catastrophic decision was not their inability to maintain the Rose; it was sheer opportunism. With the same money crisis confronting them that stares all colleges and universities down – but without any respect whatsoever for their predecessors who had created a model museum of contemporary art that put Brandeis on the cultural map nationally and internationally – the current stewards of its long-standing, now grievously compromised excellence looked at the Rose’s art holdings and saw a quick fix. In essence it would seem that the collection shimmered in the cash-strapped trustees’ eyes like grandmother’s bejeweled necklace; an expensive bauble that would be easy to liquidate. And so, while she slept, they euthanized Rose.
