Links to Revive Tink: Met Debt, MoMA Notables, White-Funded Institute’s First Show, Wadsworth Directorship, Thieves’ Motives

I admit it: I’ve been neglecting you, art-lings, while focusing on my mainstream-media work this week. So here’s a quick rundown of some recent news:
—Let’s start with today. I know you all read the NY Times arts pages, but did you miss the lead sentence in a story for today’s Business Section, “Municipalities Feel Pinch as Another Debt Market Falters”?
Julie Creswell and Vikas Bajaj report:
The credit crisis paining Wall Street is reaching out across the nation, afflicting municipalities, hospitals and cultural touchstones like the Metropolitan Museum of Art….Alarmed by the running turmoil in the debt markets, investors have refused to buy certain securities that not long ago many regarded as equivalent to cash….The Metropolitan Museum of Art is now paying 15 percent on auction securities. It is unclear how long such high rates will persist, or when the market for these instruments will revive, if at all.
As I mentioned here, the Met’s liabilities ballooned some 60 percent in fiscal 2007, due chiefly to the issuance in December 2006 of $130 million in tax-exempt bonds for capital projects. Total 2007 indebtedness was $162.83 million, compared to only $34.9 million the previous year. (I don’t know how much of that consists of the “auction securities” that are the subject of the NY Times piece.)
—The Museum of Modern Art keeps one, loses one: Carol Vogel gets the scoop (of course) that MoMA’s board this week approved a new five-year contract for director Glenn Lowry. I wonder if it has a Philippe de Montebello clause, giving a big lump payout if he stays for a certain number of years? Who can say? According to Vogel, the trustees refused to release any details about Glenn’s future compensation. Since they haven’t learned the transparency-is-the-best-policy lesson, despite last February’s disturbing revelations, we’ll just have to keep an eye out for future Form 990 tax returns, which are public documents.
Also at MoMA, one of the country’s most respected art museum lawyers, Stephen Clark, is headed to Southern California, from whence I have just returned: MoMA’s deputy general counsel steps up to become vice president and general counsel of the J. Paul Getty Trust, effective Apr. 21. Will he be shifting his focus from Nazi-loot claimants to source-country claimants?
—Speaking of which, New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, controversially bankrolled by collector, benefactor and now repatriator Shelby White, has announced its first exhibition, Wine, Worship and Sacrifice: The Golden Graves of Ancient Vani. The show is organized in partnership with the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries. The lenders of most of the more than 130 objects are the Georgian National Museums at Tbilisi and Vani. The pieces come from excavations of four graves at Vani in the Republic of Georgia, which was the setting for the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece
Meanwhile, the new institute, strongly criticized by some archaeologists for accepting White’s $200-million gift, has only one faculty member, Roger S. Bagnall, formerly of Columbia University, and has advertised for five to 10 more.
—Is this one of the country’s toughest art museum directorships to fill? The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, has just named Susan Lubowsky Talbott, currently director of Smithsonian Arts under Ned Rifkin, the undersecretary of art at the Smithsonian Institution. Her target audience, reports Matt Eagen in the Hartford Courant, will be cabbies. I heartily endorse this plan, having just come from Los Angeles where most cab drivers seem to have no idea of the whereabouts of many art museums (or hotels, for that matter).
The Wadsworth’s press release seems to be an attempt to dispel the Hartford museum’s aura of hard times:
Coleman H. Casey, president of the board of trustees and since August 2007 the museum’s acting director, noted, “In less than a year the Wadsworth Atheneum has become a re-energized, strategically driven, and fiscally sound institution, which enabled us to attract a broad and highly qualified field of candidates.
—With all the theories I’ve read recently about why thieves steal art from museums, I’ve never seen this one before. Eric Gibson speculates in today’s Wall Street Journal:
Perhaps art thievery persists for reasons that have less to do with personal prestige or monetary gain than with a vague sense of cultural longing….Art theft…is a kind of veneration, albeit of a decidedly sinister sort, a backhanded salute to art’s powerful grip on the collective imagination. In spite of its inherent difficulties and risks, art theft may be driven primarily by art’s easy availability and its high social profile.
—I know you all want to hear what I think about the new Broad Museum of Contemporary art in LA. But if I tell you, the above-mentioned editor of the Wall Street Journal‘s “Leisure & Arts” page will shoot me.
Patience, art-lings: You know I’ll have lots more to say once the piece (which I’ve just finished) is published.