BlogBack: Daniel Grant on the Eakins Controversy

Daniel Grant, author and contributing editor of American Artist Magazine, reacts to my diatribe against the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ sale of “The Cello Player” to help pay for “The Gross Clinic”:
The Philadelphia Museum’s and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ need to deaccession works from their collections to raise the $68 million to pay for “The Gross Clinic” needs to be seen in a larger context: What do museums really need and how may they achieve their goals, for the public benefit?
My concern about the Association of Art Museum Directors’ deaccession policy is that it reflects a distaste for private ownership of art, as though individual collectors represent a menace to high culture. It is an onerous policy that discourages museums from ridding themselves of objects that may be duplicative or for which they have no use.
How many Renoirs must the Metropolitan Museum have in storage that will never be put on display in its galleries? If one private collector puts one of these lesser Renoirs on his or her living room wall, far more people would gain enjoyment from it.
Back in the 1980s, when the Japanese were heavily involved in the purchase of Impressionist paintings, there was great fear of our losing our cultural heritage to them. Today’s newly rich buyers from China, Russia, India and the Middle East seem to be buying their own national artists more than ours. So now our fears have moved away from foreigners to our own wealthy collectors—Alice Walton among them.
The outcry over the New York Public Library’s recent deaccessioning of its Asher Durand, the Guggenheim’s deaccessioning of modern works back in the 1990s, and the current nervousness about the Pennsylvania Academy’s Eakins suggest a very rigid idea of what cultural institutions should be doing.