As suggested in the BlogBack below, a few CultureGrrl readers and tweeters have interpreted my previous post—“Danaë” Downpour: Metropolitan Museum & Yale University Shower Dealer Richard Feigen With Gold—as criticizing the Metropolitan Museum’s curators for their high praise of a privately owned work displayed in their galleries that has now been dispatched to Sotheby’s for sale.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The curators’ praise was fully justified, as was the Met’s decision to display “Danaë” as a loan to its permanent-collection galleries. The reason I photographed Orazio Gentileschi‘s luminous work when I toured the Met’s reinstallation of its European paintings galleries in 2013 was that I was thoroughly captivated by it:
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
The point of my post was that museum loan agreements should restrict lenders from immediately auctioning works that have just come off prestigious public display, to guard against the unseemly appearance that public institutions are being used as a vehicles for private owners’ market maneuvers.
That said, here’s the most thoughtful curatorial response that I’ve received to my post, from Jonathan Stuhlman, senior curator of American, modern, and contemporary art at the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC:
While I generally agree with the positions taken in your posts and applaud your watchdog approach re: ethics in the field, don’t you think that there is something to be said for sharing important works in private collections with the public?
Admittedly, the Met and even Yale have an embarrassment of riches compared to other places (like, for example, Charlotte, where the general populace has fewer opportunities to see such masterpieces), so perhaps I am particularly sensitive to this. But even so, I would hope that you’d place more trust in those in my profession when they praise the merits of a stellar object.
I’m skeptical that Feigen’s loans to these places did much to significantly burnish the works’ value, at least in this case. The concept of no-sale clauses attached to loans seems fascinating, but how would one realistically determine how long the moratorium should be? Does three years, for example, sufficiently “buffer” the work from the market?
All good food for thought…