Ten-foot aluminum chairs and a folding table fill an entire room in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. It looks as though a group of giants abandoned a poker game. Down the hallway, a security guard waits near a small sign that reads, “Please take off your shoes before entering the Mirrored Room.” Upon entering the installation, you’re met by infinite duplications of your own image. Chandeliers of faux flowers dripping with black wax decked the halls of the gallery this past summer. These are just a few of the gallery’s contemporary art pieces. New additions could include dead livestock arranged in a glass boxes filled with formaldehyde, or giant projector screens focusing on nothing but an artist’s studio for hours.
What is the price of these avant-garde works? Apparently, it’s the cost of hundreds of the oldest pieces the gallery has, nearly all of the museum’s work created before 1800.
On November 10, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery announced plans to auction off about 200 older pieces at New York City auction house Sotheby’s. This sent Buffalo’s art community into a debate over both the necessity of the sale, and the ethics behind it. But the museum is standing by their need for funds in order to support their contemporary collection.
A Mission to Save the Collection
Former University at Buffalo professor and Pulitzer Prize winning poet Carl Dennis has formed a group called The Buffalo Art Keepers within the museum’s membership with the intention of stopping the sale. The Art Keepers are collecting signatures of at least five percent of the museum’s 6,000 members in order to hold a public meeting with the museum’s board of directors to discuss the matter. “We must act now,” beckons Dennis in a letter to Artvoice. “The items have all been shipped to Sotheby’s in New York, and the first lot is scheduled to be auctioned on March 15.” Time is running out to even think about saving the collection, and Dennis will stop at nothing to complete his mission.
“The justification offered for the sale is not valid, the sale violates the basic duty of the gallery to cherish our cultural heritage, and the secret manner in which deliberations leading to the sale have been conducted violates the right of the members and the community to open and transparent dealing,” Dennis expressed to Artvoice.
A loss of great cultural artifacts should not be taken lightly. Buffalo is still bemoaning its decision to demolish Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin House in 1950, a brilliant and famous architectural work. Art lovers are wary about the museum’s potentially risky tactics, and many are ready to fight to stop the sale.
Not Just Some “Old Art”
What’s exactly on the auction block? The works at stake are not just a few pieces, but an immense variety of about 200 works ranging from Chinese pottery to Flemish paintings. Two of the pieces, a Benin bronze head of an Oba and an Aztec stone figure of the goddess Chalchiuhtlicue, were once listed as the Gallery’s Collection Highlights webpage—they were taken down after the auction was announced. University at Buffalo Art History Professor Livingston Watrous says that a Roman sculpture of a young man’s torso circa 1 or 2 A.D. and a rare medieval piece are two items that are important to the history of art, and should not be sold.
Dennis stresses that by giving up the artwork, the community has nowhere else to go to view ancient treasures. The Albright-Knox is the only place students can see this kind of art. Older works, “play an especially important role because they tend to be more immediately accessible to the beginner, and so provide a welcome starting point for interests that then can develop gradually to include the modern and the contemporary,” Dennis said in his letter to Artvoice.
Although the Albright-Knox’s mission statement says that it “has a clear and compelling mission to acquire, exhibit, and preserve both modern and contemporary art,” those opposing the sale say that historical art is vital to interpreting contemporary art.
Carl Dennis worries that the sale will affect the public’s understanding of the history of art. He says that by letting go of the pieces, patrons will not be able to see historical art in context with modern and multicultural art. Watrous, too, says the necessity of keeping the collection is attributed to the fact, “art doesn’t exist in a vacuum” and although the Albright-Knox is a modern and contemporary museum, antiquities need to be viewed to understand their influences on the modern.
David Derner, a local sculptor and member of The Buffalo Art Keepers, told The Buffalo News that he “learned his craft on those pieces,” likely referring to works like the exquisite example of classical sculpture, “Artemis and the Stag.” He goes on to ask, “Doesn’t Buffalo deserve to have a small collection that gives people a sense of the history of art?”
Sandy Olsen, the Director of the UB Art Gallery agrees that it does, but the gallery’s board suggests that sacrifices must be made in order to move ahead. “If a museum focuses on contemporary works, five years from now they won’t be contemporary,” she says
What is Deaccession, Anyway?
The museum’s choice to auction off its works is part of many museums’ protocol. Although deaccession, or the sale of a museum’s permanent works, can prove to be troublesome, it is sometimes vital, especially when an institution is lacking in funds or needs to consistently update its collection.
Some recent instances of deaccession have greatly increased the trend to sell permanent collections for new works. A December 22 article in Financial Times, a London publication, cites many famed deaccessions, such as in 1990, when the Guggenheim’s radical director Thomas Krens signed off on the sale of “major pieces from the museum to finance a multimillion-dollar purchase of minimalist art from the collection of Giuseppe Panza di Biumo.” Shortly after Krens’ bold move, The Museum of Modern Art followed, auctioning off Jackson Pollock’s “12, 1949” for a whopping $11.65 million, despite the fact it is a smaller work done on paper, not canvas. Other museums like the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth and the Getty Museum have sold some of their “original endowments,” according to the Financial Times article.
Sandy Olsen said that deaccession is “part of every museum’s collection management policy.” The funds from the sale of artworks are typically excluded for the purchase of new works. Olsen stated that there is an unwritten ethical policy for museums to use money they make on sales for the purpose of expanding their collections, not for adding additions or frivolously spending everything at once.
Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems?
Last week, the museum board and their lawyers agreed to meet with The Buffalo Art Keepers so the group could direct their grievances to those who made the decision to sell the art. They met at 9 a.m. in front of the Erie County Legislature, who largely stayed out of the discussion. Much of the controversy stemming from the sale is how museum director Louis Grachos went about the decision. Dennis and Watrous are both concerned about the secretive nature of the decision, pointing out that members of the Albright-Knox were not alerted prior to the call. Sandy Olsen, however, said that the Board of Trustees for the museum “absolutely has the sole right to make decisions regarding the collection,” and “the public, even the members, do not have a say in the matters of deaccession.”
At the meeting, Dennis said that the museum’s decision should have been reflective of the public’s opinion. “[Their] needs should be paramount rather than learning [about the sale] in the newspaper. Why weren’t members notified? It never came up in any meeting. They thought they [the members] would be outraged. We should be outraged.”
Members have no real power in issues regarding the museum. The members of the museum elect the Board of Directors, but have no power over their decisions. The most they can do is petition for a meeting with the board, one that still bears no power over the board any more than an advisement. Dennis said during the meeting that since the members elect the board, the board should be expected to act in their interests.
The logistics regarding the sale seem corporate, not cultural. Facts and figures have been spewed across local, national, and even international publications for months. How much is the museum going to get? What if they don’t get enough money? How much money is needed to support a sprawling contemporary collection? Despite the fact that museums typically are nonprofit organizations, art is expensive, and lofty sums of money are vital to the strength and influence of an institution.
As was spoken of in the Erie Legislature meeting, the museum has been the only Buffalo institution that has stayed completely intact throughout the past century. Tourists look to the museum when thinking of coming to Buffalo and, truth be told, they come not for the historic collection, but for the modern and contemporary art. To a certain extent, the argument seems between the museum as a keeper of historic pieces for our community and a center for the newest and most popular contemporary works, money versus history.
Strike While the Iron is Hot
Fortunately for the museum, today’s art market, even for antiquities, is inflated. In a Podcast interview with Louis Grachos and Charlie Banta, the Albright-Knox Board President, on Buffalo Rising’s webpage, Banta discussed how much the sale would increase the museum’s funds. He estimates that the sale may possibly accumulate about $30 million, which would then be added to the museum’s $58 million endowment.
Because the acquisition part of the museum’s endowment only allows five percent to be taken out for new works, the extra money will stay in the endowment year to year. Banta estimated that if the Albright-Knox is able to double its endowment every ten years by conserving its expenditures, the gallery would be able to increase their funds to $240 million. He said that the “money will go on forever” and the “impact will be absolutely enormous.”
By swiftly moving to auction off the pieces when the market is hot, Banta says they will avoid missing their window of opportunity and avoid an “enormous cost to the institution.” Like any other industry, the art market rises and falls. Sometimes works make a killing at the auction block, and sometimes they may not even garner their worth. Sandy Olsen said that throughout the ‘80s into the ‘90s the market was very inflated. During the online interview, Banta warned that because art prices are so instable, after 1990 prices dropped for the next five years over 60 percent. By moving quickly on the sale, the gallery can expect a hefty payoff.
Hard Knox Life
Some claim that the Albright-Knox is a historical museum and antiquities were always supposed to be part of their collection. Watrous claims that there are no records of the Albright-Knox having anything to do with contemporary art.
A February 22 article in The Buffalo News says that The Buffalo Art Keepers plan to take legal action against the Albright-Knox. They will be looking back to a 1987 version of the museum’s management policy, which says that there shall be, “no sale of masterpieces; nor, in terms of our own collection, of very important works.” The Albright-Knox claims that they removed that clause in their 2001 policy, years before definite talks of deaccession occurred.
The Albright-Knox has focused on purchasing contemporary works for decades. In the November 10 press release alerting the public of the sale the museum said that, “Jackson Pollock’s ‘Convergence,’ Franz Kline’s ‘New York, NY,’ Robert Motherwell’s ‘Elegy to the Spanish Republic,’ Willem de Kooning’s ‘Gotham News, 1955,’ Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Ace,’ and Andy Warhol’s ‘100 Cans,’ were acquired either immediately or within a few years of their execution.” These works were not famous when the museum purchased them. In fact, Pollock’s “Convergence” was bought for only $3,000, now it is estimated to be worth $140 million according to London-based The Telegraph.
“I think at the end of the day, if you talk to someone in Moscow or Paris or Prague, they might know the Albright-Knox…Cultural tourists travel to Buffalo to see certain works in this collection. And they are not the antiquities, they’re not the Chinese material, they’re not the few Egyptian pieces we have. They are the modern works,” Grachos told Artvoice. The Albright-Knox has been considered the runner-up in regards to their extensive collection of modern and contemporary art, trailing only The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
What lies in store for the Albright-Knox? No one knows for sure. The matter at hand is whether to preserve the older works, which could possibly hinder the museum’s reputation of presenting groundbreaking contemporary pieces, or allow the museum to take a risk, and perhaps 50 years from now, a giant mattress or pile of sand will be the next Picassos.
