In my post last week spotlighting the lack of transparency about the financial terms (collegial loan or money-making rental?) of the Museum of Modern Art’s planned dispatch of some 150 masterworks for temporary display at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Melbourne, I promised that if I learned more from the NGV, you’d learn more.
Photo by Robert Merkel at English Wikipedia
Here’s how a spokesperson from the Australian museum answered my recent queries (emphasis added):
We are delighted to be working in partnership with MoMA to bring some of the world’s best contemporary and modern art and design exclusively to Melbourne, Australia.
In regards to your specific questions [about the financial arrangements], this information is commercial in confidence.
Huh?
This peculiar locution (in italics) is keyed to legal language regarding what exemptions from disclosure are allowed by government-funded institutions under Victoria’s Freedom of Information law. The NGV’s and MoMA’s stonewalling are reminiscent of the British Museum’s non-disclosure of its fee for planned loans to Abu Dhabi’s Zayed National Museum, on the dubious grounds that this could “damage commercial interests.”
I understand that the NGV doesn’t want to bite the hand of an important lender by sharing information that MoMA already has refused to disclose to me. (“We can’t discuss specific financial arrangements,” in MoMA’s terse words.)
But as I observed in describing the lack of transparency regarding the terms of the the British Museum/Zayed National Museum transaction, none of the museums in these arrangements are commercial enterprises, so arrangements between them shouldn’t be treated like business secrets.
The NGV (unlike privately operated MoMA) is subject to government Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. The provisions in Victoria’s FOI law that the NGV echoed in its “commercial-in-confidence” response to me permits exemption from disclosure for “matters of a business, commercial or financial nature [where] the disclosure of the information would be likely to expose the undertaking unreasonably to disadvantage.” It also allows exemption from disclosure of “any information or matter communicated in confidence by or on behalf of a person or a government to an agency.”
It’s time for museums stop invoking some nonexistent commercial imperative to cloak in secrecy the terms of transactions between them. And it’s high time for art-rich museums to stop “lending” objects as means of boosting their own financial resources at the expense of sister institutions.
The Association of Art Museum Directors should get on this (but probably won’t). Its guidelines for the field, Professional Practices in Art Museums, specifically state (on p. 9):
Museums rely on one another for loans to exhibitions, and a spirit of cooperation and collegiality should inform decisions relative to such loans and the setting of charges and fees [emphasis added].