Hi Eveyone,

This article appeared in today's NY Times online. I thought it would
be of interest to many on the list.

Cheers!
Dave

David Harvey
Conservator
Los Angeles, California

____________________



March 14, 2007
Buffalo's Pain: Giving Up Old Art to Gain New

By RANDY KENNEDY
BUFFALO, March 13 — For a city that has lost so much unwillingly over
the last several decades — industries, prestige, jobs and more than
half its population — perhaps it was inevitable that a decision to
allow anything of great value to leave here willingly would be met
with howls of protest.

In this case the wealth is cultural, a collection of antiquities and
medieval and Renaissance art that has been given to, or bought by, the
Albright-Knox Art Gallery here since its founding in 1862 and that,
beginning next week, will go on the block in a highly anticipated
series of sales at Sotheby's in Manhattan. The museum's director and
board of trustees said that the decision to sell the pieces had not
been easy, but that for a museum whose mission has long focused on
Modern and contemporary art, the antiquities were a luxury —
especially in a city with few deep pockets — it could no longer
afford.

With the money the museum expects to raise — at least $15 million, but
possibly twice that amount — it will expand its relatively small
endowment for buying new work at a time when the competition for
contemporary art is fierce.

Since the decision was announced last November, the anger among a
dedicated group of critics has stunned even the museum's officials,
who had not expected the move to be popular. The county legislature
and the city council have both held hearings on the sale, which a
committee of the council voted to oppose. The action was symbolic,
since the museum board has broad authority to manage the collection.

On Monday night in a meeting forced by the museum's membership, more
than 600 people filled an auditorium for what amounted to an
impassioned town hall meeting on the issue. The meeting was made more
contentious because the museum's opponents had filed a lawsuit just a
day earlier asking a state judge for an injunction to stop the sales,
the first of which is scheduled for Tuesday.

"We weren't expecting to be sued, which I think is a new low for the
community," said Charles W. Banta, the president of the board that
governs the museum, in a recent interview.

Many art museums and other institutions regularly sell works to buy
others, often with little or no public attention. But over the last
few years, several high-profile sales have brought the issue of
deaccessioning to the fore, raising questions about whether museums
have become too eager to make trade-offs at a time when the art market
is surging. Those questions are particularly pointed for smaller,
often financially struggling museums like the Albright, where the
departure of any work, much less acknowledged masterpieces, can loom
large.

Adding to the opposition's fervor is the fact that several of the
items in the proposed sale — a rare Roman bronze of Artemis; a Shang
dynasty wine vessel; an Indian granite figure of Shiva considered one
of the most important ever to come to market — could be highly sought
after by places like the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art.

"These are wonderful things, many of them masterpieces, works of the
highest aesthetic achievement," said Carl Dennis, the Pulitzer
Prize-winning poet, who has led a highly vocal group opposed to the
sale, the Buffalo Art Keepers. "I don't see why we have to sell off
the old to buy the new."

He and other opponents argue that the museum should have sought more
public comment before the decision to sell. They also contend that the
museum has misrepresented its history, overemphasizing its focus on
modern and contemporary work to justify selling the older pieces.

The lawsuit contends that the museum violated its bylaws in deciding
to sell and that some sales would also violate the bequests that
brought pieces into the collection. It also cites documents from the
museum's history to argue that it has not always seen its mission as
exclusively focused on Modern and contemporary work. One example is a
1962 museum publication that refers to its tradition of collecting
"outstanding works of arts from those cultures where human expression
and art has appeared to reach its greatest level."

But Mr. Banta, the board president, and Louis Grachos, who took over
as museum director four years ago, argue that it is the opponents who
have distorted the museum's history by claiming that it has long
aspired to a more comprehensive collection of older art. They say that
several of the pieces up for auction were acquired in the 1930s, after
a conservative faction of the museum's members came to power, forcing
out A. Conger Goodyear, the industrialist and Modern-art collector,
who then went on to become the first president of the Museum of Modern
Art in Manhattan.

Mr. Banta called those years "a really dark period in the
institution's history," one of "severe mission drift." He added,
though, that if the museum had an endowment as big as that of many
larger museums, it would not have decided to sell many of the Chinese
and other premodern pieces collected then.

"If we had all the money in the world, we wouldn't sell anything, and
it's just that simple," he said. "Why would we?"

But the endowment stands at about $58 million, now generating about
$1.1 million a year for acquisitions. By contrast, the endowment of
the Museum of Modern Art is $650 million.

The Albright has long operated not by collecting artists' work in
depth but by trying to acquire key works — like Jackson Pollock's 1952
masterpiece, "Convergence," bought in 1956, one of the museum's
best-known paintings — and in the contemporary art market today ever
more money is needed to compete for such works.

"This isn't just going into the closet and taking out what Aunt Martha
gave us, just to clear house," Mr. Grachos said. "It was to look at
how this institution could find really practical ways of making sure
that we could move forward."

He noted that the museum was keeping about 80 important examples of
older and premodern art that curators believe can help illuminate the
Modern collection. It also plans a systematic collaboration with the
Buffalo Museum of Science, which recently agreed to provide loans of
many of its thousands of pieces of premodern art for exhibitions.

But opponents at the meeting on Monday night, which was closed to
journalists, said they had not been swayed. They vowed to continue
fighting what they described as a gamble in which the past was being
sold to pay for an uncertain future.

"The gallery has bet a part of the house," said Martin Pops, an
English professor at the University at Buffalo, who had addressed
those gathered in the auditorium at the Kleinhans Music Hall. "Not the
whole house, but surely an important and beautiful part of the house.
It's a bet that will effectively curtail the range and availability of
the beautiful in the visual arts in Buffalo at a gallery dedicated to
the visual arts."

He added: "Betting the house is not bold risk-taking but
self-destructive behavior."

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