Peter Schjeldahl Should Be Fired

I usually do not post much about my other cultural policy interest apart from heritage policy, which is in the area of urban cultural policy and particularly the question of what cultural scenes consist in and what role -- if any -- various kinds of cultural scenes play in the life of cities, including their economic life. But the travails in Detroit are raising the specter of their museum being forced to sell off its collection, and at this moment when we most need thoughtful and helpful responses, I was appalled to read this from the New Yorker's art critic, Peter Schjeldahl.

You should read it for yourself, but I would characterize the gist as: "I don't know much about economics, being an art critic and all, but it is a 'no-brainer' to sell the DIA art collection because the choice is sell or cut pensioners' pensions." "No-brainer", indeed, but not in the way Schjeldahl means it.    The art critic appears to believe that selling would simply generate funds that would far outstrip the loss of tax revenues that the museum would otherwise generate.

It is true that if the museum were closed the city's tax revenues would probably be reduced immediately by only $10-15 million, not anywhere close enough to offset the gain from whatever the museum could sell off in that year.

But the economic impact of the museum is in no way captured fully by counting only tax revenues generated by tourists. Museums, and other arts, along with the various amenities that altogether constitute a city's cultural scene, are magnets for human capital. They attract not just tourists but residents (usually college-educated, but certainly likely to be creatively inclined do-it-yourselfers, to which the word "entrepreneurs" might be applied were it not in such bad repute) who might decide to move to or stay in Detroit because, yes, they have an amazing art collection (among other cool things). The future of Detroit depends on its ability of its city core to successfully compete for those people moving forward, because of the tax revenues they would generate. Those revenues that would continue indefinitely and that I imagine (though I have not done the analysis myself, I admit) would dwarf the $10-15 million in direct and indirect economic impact from tourists. Detroit's ability to do that will take a big hit if the museum is liquidated -- not just because the art itself will be gone but because the sale will signal that the city has given up on its core's future altogether.

All this should be obvious to anyone who takes a few minutes to scratch the surface of the issue, but our art critic relies instead on his privileged gut. "No-brainer" might be Schjeldahl's epithet going forward. The New Yorker should be ashamed of accepting this kind of idiocy, and should fire him.

What the Italians in the Marion True Case Should Have Been Seeking from Museums

Hugh Eakin interviewed Marion True last month in the New Yorker, clearly on her side in the "ordeal", noting that the defense never made its case (it never presented its case, true enough, but surely there was a case to be made based on the massive amount of circumstantial evidence offered in Watson and Tedeschini's Medici Conspiracy).

True does deserve some sympathy as a pawn in a bigger game, but the stakes of that game are not made clear in the article. A comment by "Anderson" on Eakin's interview offers what is probably the consensus view of the case's relationship to the broader issues it is enmeshed with, those of the black market trade in looted -- not merely illicit -- antiquities and the impact museums have and could have on that market:

I have been following this case and what a black joke it all is. The international traffic in pillaged art is a huge and hugely depressing problem for anybody with an ounce of humanity and love of art, history and culture. But. It has to be said that Italy is a train wreck of a country, politically (I love Italy in every other way), with a president that has spent the last decade or so urinating on the rule of law there, where the garbage can't even be collected reliably, and where they cannot even begin to stop organized crime from the ongoing looting of their cultural heritage, very often even the heritage in their museums, much less what is buried in the ground in Puglia or Sicily or wherever. Much of the rest of the world with a significant archaeological history is in much worse shape. So the Italians prosecute a woman, not even the museum she worked for, to send a message to museums, which aren't even a snowflake on the tip of the iceberg of the problem, and have actually been really trying to help as best they can over the last couple of decades, as one would expect, dedicated as they are to the love of history, art and culture. I bet there are a lot of lawyers out there who are really happy though.

No doubt Italy has its problems, including finding adequate resources to protect its vast holdings, as we see from the collapse of the gladiatorial building in Pompeii and the plastering of advertisements on palazzi in Venice. And no doubt museums -- even museums as wealthy as the Getty -- buy only a tiny fraction of what is looted. But it would be wrong to conclude that what museums do makes no difference or that museums have been helping as best they can. Museums have a vested interest in bringing artifacts that are out of the ground into their collections, not in protecting those not yet excavated. Adopting a clean-hands policy is the least, not the best, museums could do. The best would be to forcefully urge their collector-donor-board members to support measures to clean up the antiquities trade (by legal changes making it much more difficult to traffic inadequately provenanced antiquities, reversing the burden of proof, etc.), and to urge those same wealthy collectors to voluntary donate and/or ask the government to impose taxes on antiquities sales to raise money that would be dedicate to the hiring of more site guards, satellite monitoring, or any one of dozens of ways in which looting of sites could be reduced. The shame of this prosecution is that it did not send that message to museums.

Memo to Zahi Hawass: Museums are not the main source for buying stolen antiquities

Zahi Hawass, at a news conference at the meeting convened in Cairo on recovering looted antiquities, asserts, "Museums are the main source for buying stolen artifacts. If museums stopped not to buy artifacts, actually, the theft will be less, and we can control that." (See the BBC clip, starting around 0:55).

Um, not exactly. Where to begin? Museums are not the main source for buying stolen artifacts -- that "honor" goes to individual collectors (including, increasingly, collectors in the Gulf oil states with the wherewithal to compete against American, British, and Japanese super-rich). Museums make up only a small percentage of the buyers on the antiquities market worldwide. And most museums in the West have now already stopped buying illicit or even just dodgy antiquities. That is not going to put an end to collecting of illicit antiquities. Hawass is certainly correct to say that if museums stop buying illicit artifacts, the theft will be less, but by only a slight amount. No one believes that collectors will be much deterred by knowing they cannot donate or sell their antiquities to museums, when they can count on other collectors to buy their pieces should they need to part with them. And so long as a collector is willing to pop $57 million for a single "kosher" figurine, looters are going to try to find equivalent pieces and collectors will buy them even though they are not kosher.

So if Hawass really thinks that looting will be reduced to manageable levels by getting museums out of the market, he is badly mistaken. They have already gotten out of the market, and countries being looted continue to be unable to handle the problem with the resources they've got at their disposal. Countries suffering from antiquities looting are going to need more than just clean hands from the museum world: they are going to need money to pay for site guards, satellite monitoring, helicopters, etc. That money should come from the collectors and the dealers, and from the boards of museums as well.