Should museum directors and curators parlay their nonprofit contacts into for-profit pursuits?
The latest news in museum-to-market defections—last week’s announcement that Eric Shiner, the five-year director of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, will leave Aug. 15 to join Sotheby’s—is one of several eyebrow-raising transitions suggesting that the financial incentive and frisson of becoming an art-market player are overcoming some directors’ and curators’ reluctance to forsake disinterested scholarly, educational and populist pursuits.
Shiner will become a senior vice president of Sotheby’s Fine Art Division—the new incarnation of Amy Cappellazzo‘s and Allan Schwartzman‘s Art Agency, Partners, a boutique art-advisory firm recently acquired by Sotheby’s. It’s a safe bet that Eric has been hired as a potential rainmaker, exploiting his museum-cultivated contacts with collectors and collections to help boost supply-and-demand in the Warhol market. Andy’s status as this country’s king of contemporary art sales makes Eric a desirable get.
Lisa Dennison, another museum director (Guggenheim)-turned-marketer (chairman of Sotheby’s Americas) said as much in the auction firm’s press release:
At the Andy Warhol Museum, …Eric gained unparalleled knowledge of one of the most important American artists of the 20th century, whose work is perennially sought-after in the market.
Given his evident market-friendly proclivities at the Warhol, Shiner’s crossing of the nonprofit/for-profit divide seems meant-to-be. As I tweeted here:
New @Sothebys hire, @TheWarholMuseum‘s Shiner https://t.co/Byr7EmpU9S was ripe to cross nonprofit/commercial divide https://t.co/mGTdePMvTE
— Lee Rosenbaum (@CultureGrrl) July 8, 2016
I had chatted with Shiner in 2013 at the Armory Show (a commercial art fair in New York), where he was serving as curator of Armory Focus USA. Here’s what he then told me about his decision to curate a display at a for-profit venue [emphasis added]:
When I first was approached, I thought, “There’s always a divide between the commercial world and the museum world and many people are afraid to tread over those borderlines.” And I thought, “We are always working together with commercial galleries for exhibitions and loans to museums. We certainly have a symbiotic relationship.”
And I thought, “What other opportunity am I ever going to have [now, apparently, many] to curate something within a commercial environment and to perhaps make fun of that environment and perhaps tweak it a little bit from within?”
And I then realized that if anyone was able to do this, the director of the Andy Warhol Museum would be able to do something like that, because Andy saw no discrepancy at all between art and business. It was the same. That gave me enough confidence to move forward to do this sort of thing, and I really wanted to see what it would mean to do a creative section within the commercial environment.
Now “doing a creative section [i.e., art installation] within the commercial environment” is going to become Shiner’s stock in trade.
In comments for the Warhol Museum’s farewell press release (linked at the top), Shiner remarked that he was leaving an institution that was “strong in both financial health and in future potential.” Unmentioned, though, were several weaknesses in those areas: Shiner’s scheme to open a New York branch of the museum fell apart due to “business and other operational considerations,” as reported last year by Marylynne Pitz in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
And the museum’s lack of acquisition funds set the stage for an unorthodox arrangement with mega-dealer Larry Gagosian to snare this work to which Shiner had taken a shine:
© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
Two months ago, the museum’s press release said this about that transaction:
To achieve the goal of acquiring a painting from the “Do It Yourself” series, despite not having an acquisition fund, The Warhol with its museum board and Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh leadership, after thoughtful deliberation made the decision to deaccession paintings from its collection.
Following industry guidelines and procedures [emphasis added] several pieces from the museum’s collection were traded for this new work. These deaccessioned works were all from series in the museum’s collection which were already well represented.
Wait a minute! The bible of museum ethics—the Association of Art Museum Directors’ (AAMD’s) Professional Practices in Art Museums—says this (on p. 20) about museum disposals:
A member museum should publish on its website [emphasis added] and within a reasonable period of time works that have been deaccessioned and disposed of.
Far from “following these industry guidelines and procedures,” the Warhol Museum refused to disclose the identity of the works it had swapped for Gagosian’s Warhol. Shiner is a member of AAMD.
Here’s what the museum’s spokesperson told me today, in response to my queries about what works were involved in the “Do It Yourself” transaction, and how the museum had ascertained that the monetary value of what it was getting was comparable to what it was giving up:
The trade involved five paintings from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s. We don’t identify the works by name because the museum no longer owns them. [AAMD: Do you copy?]
The Warhol makes no comment on the commercial value of its collection or individual pieces in its collection. This policy is in place both for security reasons and because the museum views the value of its collection in artistic rather than monetary terms.
However, the exchange of collection items for Warhol’s “Do It Yourself (Sailboats)” was supported by several outside valuations and fully vetted by the appropriate leadership.
The addition of “Do It Yourself (Sailboats)” to the museum’s collection helps The Warhol achieve its mission of being the keeper of Warhol’s legacy through better telling the story of his artistic achievement. As such, the picture is priceless to the museum [emphasis added].
Priceless??? All works have prices, as a future Sotheby’s operative must surely know. We can only hope that Shiner was confident that the shrewd dealer didn’t get the better of him on this deal.
The Warhol’s new director, when chosen, should abandon Shiner’s strategy of using works from the collection as trading chips, without transparency about which works are being jettisoned. Patrick Moore, the Warhol’s managing director, will serve as interim director during the search for Shiner’s permanent replacement.