Yesterday I had the sad task of deleting the late Michael Thomas (who died on Aug. 7) from my list of devoted monthly donors to this blog. An “acerbic columnist and novelist, who wrote chiefly about money and how people got it, what they did with it and what it did to them” (as described by Katharine Seelye in her NY Times obit for him), he had once been an assistant curator of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum. Throughout his life, he remained a keen observer of the artworld and the art market. After briefly aspiring to be an art dealer, he rose to fame as a noted columnist and author.
As a regular recipient of my email blast for CultureGrrl donors, he occasionally commented on my posts in his customary gadfly persona. Never one to mince words, he shot off an exasperated response to my post of last September—“Birkenau” Blunder: Metropolitan Museum Says Richter’s Riffs on the Holocaust are “Poignant”:
How can the Met show Richter, period? The most boring uninteresting painter out there, but a perfect artist for today’s aesthetically illiterate constituency of billionaire suckers.
And then there was this—his rejoinder to my post later that same month—$40-Million Collection-Care Goal: Brooklyn Museum’s 1st Round of Art Sales Under AAMD’s Relaxed Rules:
You’re tiptoeing around the elephant (in many cases, I suspect literally, at least politically speaking) in the room. Brooklyn is selling art. The Met Opera is closing for a year. Everywhere you turn, staff at all levels is being let go. Why? Because these institutions need money to operate. And yet…and yet… As I recently emailed a friend who was keening and rending garments of about the Met Opera suspension, “How is this possible? Richest, fanciest, showoffiest board, seats you have to float a bond issue to afford—and yet not enough to ride it out for a year!”
Where are the trustees in all this? I’ll tell you where: Palm Beach – to avoid NY state and city taxes! Southampton—buying 2 or 3 houses at several million a clip. The $50 million is pocket change for some on Brooklyn’s board. Writing pious, virtue-signalling letters to the media about better “stakeholder” service won’t keep museum doors open. Forming committees with “Belonging” in their titles won’t either. Let’s get real.
A few days later, I arguably “got real” about “the elephant”—here and here.
My suspension (via PayPal) of Michael Thomas’ blog benefactions prompted me to ponder anew the problems posed by “digital assets”—the need for one’s heirs and/or executors to have the information they need to determine and terminate the online activities of the deceased (particularly those with financial ramifications). At least I’ve now taken care of that as pertains to Michael’s CultureGrrl connection.
I will miss his feisty jibes and iconoclastic spirit. I also regret not having an image of him to use with this post. (I couldn’t manage to come up with one that isn’t subject to copyright restrictions. Help me, art-lings!) You can see him peering over the top of his eyeglasses on his Amazon author’s page, where many of the listed titles include the word, “MONEY.”
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