Right: New York State Regent James Dawson
In a motion filed in Davidson County Chancery Court on Friday, Tennessee Attorney General Robert Cooper echoed CultureGrrl’s critique from Wednesday of the muddled logic in Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle‘s Memorandum and Order. In an astonishing turnaround from her previous pronouncement in favor of a Nashville-only solution for Fisk University’s Stieglitz Collection, the judge on Tuesday rejected the AG’s plan for temporarily housing the collection in Nashville’s Frist Center for the Visual Arts until Fisk could reassume custodianship. She also gave Fisk’s lawyers a big assist in gaining her approval for a $30-million collection-sharing agreement between the university and Alice Walton‘s Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, AR, by providing them with her recommended wording for their revised proposal, due to be filed by Oct. 8.
Here’s what the AG said in his Motion to Clarify Lyle’s Sept. 14 Memorandum and Order:
The Attorney General offered a proposal that would guarantee the continued maintenance and display of the Collection in Nashville 100% of the time into the future….
The Court in its ruling earlier this week rejected the Attorney General’s proposal as a “short-term solution” and a “temporary fix.” The Attorney General would like to correct that apparent miscommunication. There is nothing “short-term” or “temporary” about the plan. It provides an appropriately funded and structured mechanism to support the full-time display and maintenance of the Stieglitz Collection in Nashville into the indefinite future [emphasis added].
The only “temporary” element of the arrangement is the appropriate suggestion that Fisk University should be able to resume custody and display of the art when it has the financial ability to do so.
What’s more, the AG asked Lyle to do him the same favor that she did for Fisk’s lawyers, by to “identify[ing] the specific provisions of the Attorney General’s proposal that the Court believes to be inconsistent with cy pres relief and allow the Attorney General the opportunity to suggest appropriate modification.”
(I’ll provide an online link to the full text of the AG’s motion, if and when I get one.)
In another head-scratcher from her Memorandum and Order of Sept. 14, Lyle overruled her own statement, on Page 11 of her Aug. 20 decision, where she noted that Tennessee’s Court of Appeals had not found any intent by Georgia O’Keeffe,
the donor of the Stieglitz Collection, to “perpetuat[e] the existence of
Fisk.” Contradicting herself and the higher court’s
finding, Lyle now says (on Page 5 of the Memorandum and Order, linked in this post’s first paragraph) that “it would not be in keeping…with the
donor’s [O’Keeffe’s] intent to keep the
Collection in Nashville at the cost of sacrificing the existence of
Fisk.”
Meanwhile, moving north, it appears that Regent James Dawson, who had long been a vocal proponent of tightening the New York Board of Regents’ regulations on deaccessioning, felt as blindsided by the Regents flip-flop as Tennessee’s AG had felt by Chancellor Lyle’s turnaround.
Dawson told me:
I did not know ahead of time that his [Regent Roger Tilles’] motion [to kill the more stringent regulations] was going to be presented. I
argued against it and [as CultureGrrl previously reported] I abstained on the vote in Committee. Regent Tilles became chair of the Regents’ Cultural Education Committee on July 1, 2010. [Dawson was its previous chair.]
This abrupt change in the Regents’ approach to deaccessioning was engineered without proper consultation with those public officials and museum professionals who had long worked to safeguard the public’s patrimony by tightening the regulations. And there has been no adequate public explanation as to how and why this reversal happened.
In reponding to my commentary on the Regents’ flip-flop, Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, whose bill to regulate deaccessions recently died in the State Legislature, told me that once the more stringent rules expire next month, he believes there is a loophole in the preexisting rules that would permit museums, under certain circumstances, to apply deaccession proceeds to operating expenses. You can read more details about his analysis in an update that I added to the middle of this post.