Art sales by brokers

 High priced art sold by Sotheby's isn't all sold at auction. Sometimes it is privately brokered.

The Financial Times has the story of how a trial is shedding light on the process.

Sotheby’s trial provides a peek behind the curtain of private art sales. Testimony in New York case pitting wealthy oligarch against the famed auction house has shed new light on high-end transactions. by Madison Darbyshire 

"While Sotheby’s is known for its prestigious public art auctions, a significant part of its business is brokering private deals directly between buyers and sellers. Those private sales are a particularly shrouded corner of the art market, where work changes hands through dealers such as Sotheby’s and identities are concealed on both sides of the purchase.

"Often an owner will have no idea to whom they are selling, and the buyer little clue from where the art is coming. Sometimes works are never even displayed — instead living in storage, passing from hand to hand.

...

" "For private sales Sotheby’s dealers search for works their clients are seeking, working internally to find willing sellers and negotiate a price. Emails showed Valette asking a colleague to have her client name a price for a René Magritte painting that Bouvier wanted. While the painting had initially been estimated by Sotheby’s to be worth less than $10mn based on previous auction data, the client was willing to part with it for $25mn. Bouvier purchased it from Sotheby’s for $24mn, and sold it to Rybolovlev shortly afterwards for $43.5mn."

Repugnant sales of art: deaccessioning, in Switzerland

 "Deaccessioning" is a repugnant transaction in the art world, in which it's often considered acceptable to sell art only to finance the purchase of other art, and not to keep a museum from going bankrupt.  I've written about this in the U.S. context, but it's an international phenomenon.

The NY Times has the story, from Switzerland:

Swiss Museum in Financial Straits Sells Three Cézannes for $53 Million. Museum Langmatt said the sales were necessary to keep its doors open. Critics had said they violated industry guidelines on when a museum should sell off parts of its collection.

"The Foundation Langmatt’s decision to sell the Cézannes earned wide criticism before the auction. The Swiss branch of the International Council of Museums, which said the sale was a clear breach of its guidelines for de-accessioning from museum collections, called for the paintings to be withdrawn.

The underbelly of the global art market (NYT)

 Art is not just art, it's also an investment opportunity, and one that evades many of the regulations that apply to investments recognized as securities.

The NY Times has the story, which is long and interesting throughout.  It follows an investigation begun by the lawyer Claude Dumont Beghi .

The Inheritance Case That Could Unravel an Art Dynasty/How a widow’s legal fight against the Wildenstein family of France has threatened their storied collection — and revealed the underbelly of the global art market.  By Rachel Corbett

"First, she drew up a list of known assets, which soon zigzagged into a chart of far-flung bank accounts, trusts and shell corporations. Over the course of several years, she would fly around the world to tax havens and free ports, prying open the armored vaults and anonymous accounts that mask many of the high-end transactions in the $68 billion global art market. Multimillion-dollar paintings can anonymously trade hands without, for example, any of the requisite titles or deeds of real estate transactions or the public disclosures required on Wall Street. She would learn that the inscrutability of the trade has made it a leading conduit for sanction-evading oligarchs and other billionaires looking to launder excess capital. 

...

"Independent of any national jurisdiction, free ports allow traders to ship and store property without paying taxes or customs duties. If a dealer buys a painting in one country, he can ship it to a free port without paying import taxes; then, when he is offered the right price, he can sell it there too, without paying capital gains. It has been estimated that $100 billion worth of art and collectibles are held in the Geneva free port alone, to say nothing of those in Zurich, Luxembourg, Singapore, Monaco, Delaware or Beijing.

...

"many of their practices are commonplace in high levels of the art trade, which a 2020 U.S. Senate subcommittee called the “largest legal, unregulated market.” Unlike financial institutions, art businesses are not expressly subject to the Bank Secrecy Act, which requires firms to verify customers’ identities, report large cash transactions and flag suspicious activity. A study from the U.S. Department of the Treasury last year cited a figure estimating that money laundering and other financial crimes in the art market may amount to about $3 billion a year. (Britain and the European Union, however, have implemented anti-money-laundering regulations that require stricter due diligence in art transactions there.)

"According to a report by Art Basel and UBS, auction houses did about $31 billion in sales last year. They say that they know who their clients are, but those may just be the names of art advisers or other intermediaries. And collectors’ insistence on anonymity, long framed as genteel discretion, hasn’t budged. The buyer of the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction, Leonardo da Vinci’s $450.3 million “Salvator Mundi,” registered at Christie’s a day before bidding with a $100 million down payment, identifying himself as one of 5,000 princes in Saudi Arabia. A few weeks later, it was revealed that the true buyer was Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — who was reportedly displaying the painting on his superyacht — and that a little-known cousin of his bought it as a proxy." 

Calligraphy fan: OR and Game Theory

 Haibo Wang visited and brought me a fan, with calligraphy from his dad in Chinese characters.

Alex Chan translates:

"What is written is “運籌帷幄 博弈天下”.   運籌 is logistics (運籌學 is operations research) 博弈is gaming (and 博弈論 is  game theory)." 

"And the translation for the whole phrase is something like: strategizing and gaming the world - this is how you might describe a general." 

Deaccessioning dispute at Valparaiso

 Selling donated art is controversial, but it is tempting when the budget is bare...

The NY Times has the story:

Its Georgia O’Keeffe Is Worth Millions. And Its Dorms Need Updating. In the face of declining enrollment, Valparaiso University in Indiana wants to raise money to renovate two dormitories by selling treasures from its art museum. Not everyone is on board.  By Kalia Richardson, March 10, 2023

"Valparaiso, a Lutheran university in northwestern Indiana that is struggling with the declining enrollment seen at many schools, is planning to sell several works from the collection of its Brauer Museum of Art to raise $10 million for the renovation of two freshman dormitories, which it sees as key to securing its future.

"The announcement angered many arts organizations and has divided the university: Last week the faculty senate approved a nonbinding resolution that sought to halt the sale and identify alternative ways to fund the renovations.

...

"Schools typically court controversy when they announce they will sell artworks to raise funds, an act known as deaccessioning. Several sales have resulted in sanctions from art associations. To settle a lawsuit, Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., reversed its decision to sell off its artwork and close its museum, part of a plan it had made in 2009 during the Great Recession."

The market for large dinosaur fossils

Should fossils be regarded as national treasures, or as natural resources, or perhaps works of art? 

The NY Times has the story:

As Dinosaur Fossils Fetch Millions, There’s Many a Bone to Pick. Fossils are a multimillion-dollar business, bringing legal disputes, nondisclosure agreements and trademarks to the world of paleontology.  By Julia Jacobs and Zachary Small

"Fossil hunting has become a multimillion-dollar business, much to the chagrin of academic paleontologists who worry that specimens of scientific interest are being sold off to the highest bidders.

...

"Things were simpler at the beginning of his career, Larson said, when universities, museums and a smaller group of private collectors were the only ones who cared about buying pieces of natural history.

"It was not until 1997, with the sale of Sue, that dinosaurs started to be viewed as potential centerpieces of auctions.

...

"Many scientists are aghast at the growing commercial market, and increasingly anxious that scientifically important specimens will disappear into private mansions. Paleontologists are also concerned that the market could encourage illegal digging, and that American landowners — who, by law, generally own the fossils found on their land — would favor commercial fossil hunters over academic researchers.

“Ranchers who used to let you go and collect specimens are now wondering why they should let you have it for free,” said Jingmai O’Connor, a Field Museum paleontologist, “when a commercial collector would dig up the bones and split the profit.”

"Fossil diggers and dealers in the commercial sphere counter that if not for them, these specimens on private land would be left to erode further, never to be found.

"The United States is an outlier legally. Other dinosaur-rich nations, including Mongolia and Canada, have laws making fossils the property of the government. Thomas Carr, a paleontologist at Carthage College in Wisconsin, said he believed that the lack of protections for “natural heritage” puts scientists in the United States at a disadvantage."

Repugnant trade in (and study of) fossils

 Who should be allowed to export, study and display important fossils?

Nature has the story:

How a Brazilian dinosaur sparked a movement to decolonize fossil science. Rather than excitement, the discovery of the species set off a Latin American movement to stop colonial palaeontology.  by Mariana Lenharo & Meghie Rodrigues

"In December 2020, a paper in the journal Cretaceous Research sent shock waves through the palaeontology community1. It described a dinosaur species that the authors named Ubirajara jubatus — the first dinosaur found in the Southern Hemisphere to display what were probably precursors to modern feathers. The 110-million-year-old fossil had been collected in Brazil decades earlier — but no Brazilian palaeontologist had ever heard of it. The authors of the paper were from Germany, Mexico and the United Kingdom.

"It was the latest instance of what some researchers now call palaeontological colonialism, in which scientists from wealthy nations obtain specimens from low- and middle-income countries without involving local researchers, and then store the fossils abroad. The practice can sometimes be illegal. For instance, according to Brazilian law, the country’s fossils belong to the state, although the authors of the Ubirajara paper say that they had a permit signed by a Brazilian mining official allowing them to export the specimen.

...

"The practice can also deprive nations of knowledge and heritage, say researchers. “Fossils are special to us,” says Allysson Pinheiro, director of the Plácido Cidade Nuvens Palaeontological Museum in Santana do Cariri, Brazil, near where U. jubatus was found. “We have literature, arts and crafts, and music based on them.”

...

"Jeff Liston, president of the European Association of Vertebrate Palaeontologists, who is based in Edinburgh, UK, and has studied the illegal fossil trade in China, says that the scientific community has been aware of issues related to colonial palaeontology for some time — but the debate in the past few years has brought the discussion to a broader audience.

...

"In July, a panel will discuss scientific colonialism at the virtual Latin American Congress of Vertebrate Paleontology. The goal, according to Cisneros, is to promote true cooperation between palaeontologists. “We don’t want researchers from other countries to stop working here. What we hope for is that partnerships are more equitable and reciprocal. And that our laws are respected, as we respect the laws of other countries.”

...

"Minjin strongly advocates that fossils remain in their places of origin. “In Mongolia, fossils have been out of the country for the last 100 years,” she says. “Now we are facing an issue: how to find the next generation of scientists?” When children don’t grow up seeing fossils as part of their heritage and aren’t exposed to knowledge that excites them, she says, there is little motivation to become scientists."

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I'm reminded of restrictions on the export of cultural treasures such as works of art. Here are some earlier posts...:

Wednesday, December 28, 2016

Repugnance watch: Wedgwood vase could be saved from export after culture minister intervenes

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Market for (smuggled) cultural treasures

The Art Mart

 Art galleries are (among other things) middlemen, intermediating between artists and buyers of art, who may range from passionate consumers to institutional investors. (There are of course also passionate consumers who are also investors in an asset class that, like real estate, you can enjoy while it appreciates.)  

Of course, the galleries' incentives may not always be perfectly aligned with those of creators and consumers.  Galleries play a big role in helping bring young artists to market, and matching them to consumers and investors.  But as artists become more well known, other opportunities present themselves.

Here's a story from the WSJ about tensions involving sales by galleries versus sales by auction.

Why Artwork Flipping Can Incur the Wrath of Dealers. Dealers want to control the artists’ narrative and pricing, but investors want to leave it to the market  By Daniel Grant

"Chicago gallery owner Rhona Hoffman has three or four collectors she won’t sell to again.

“They broke the rule,” says the contemporary art dealer.

"That commandment to collectors: If you later decide to sell your artwork, consign it back to the gallery—do not put it up at auction.

"When buyers ignore this rule and auction off recently purchased pieces, it’s called flipping."

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Here's an older story, from Artsy, about the British artist/entrepreneur Damien Hirst, who has a long history of ambivalence about the role of galleries in the design of the market for art.

How Damien Hirst’s $200 Million Auction Became a Symbol of Pre-Recession Decadence by Nate Freeman

"On September 15, 2008, Sotheby’s was set to auction off 223 brand new works by Damien Hirst, including top-flight examples of his whole animals in formaldehyde, medicine cabinets, and spin paintings. It was an unprecedented incursion by an auction house into the primary market, and an unabashedly flashy sale accompanied by a global marketing tour with stops in Kiev, Aspen, and New Delhi.

...

"The Hirst auction, which the artist had dubbed “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever,” exceeded all expectations, grossing $200.75 million over the course of two sales in the span of 24 hours and becoming the most expensive single-artist auction ever. The 56 lots at the evening sale went 97% sold, and the two lots that did not find buyers during the auction were sold before the night was over. Over a third of the buyers had never bought contemporary art before. On the cusp of a global recession, Hirst walked away with $172 million.

...

"Taking work directly to market through an auction house would siphon millions of dollars from Hirst’s powerful dealers, Jay Jopling and Larry Gagosian. Hirst’s set up was typical of any in-demand artist at the time: He made work, and his dealers decided where to place it. Ordinarily, it is frowned upon when a vetted collector flips a work at auction. But Damien embraced that very act of betrayal and decided to pre-flip his own works to whoever could pay, with the support of Dunphy, whom he trusted more than his two dealers.

“Frank has my best interests at heart,” Hirst told The Economist in a story published before the sale. “Dealers say they do, but they don’t.”

The market for ballet dancers, by Olivia Hartzell

 Here's a post about the market for ballet dancers, by Olivia Hartzell, an econ Ph.D. student at Harvard whose previous profession was ballet. She writes in Dance Magazine that the market for dancers isn't as thick as it might be, because there aren't uniform times at which companies hire, and efficient matches are hard to predict. She proposes a centralized clearinghouse, but anticipates some obstacles to adoption and implementation.

The Ballet Job Market Needs a Market (Re)Design  by Olivia Hartzell

"The ballet job market is what an economist would refer to as a “matching market”—you cannot simply choose where to go, but you must also be chosen. What makes the ballet market peculiar is that, unlike most professional athletic markets, directors have vastly different preferences for dancers and they mostly do not (and cannot) compete for hires with salaries. Rather, dancers are first and foremost committed to finding their best artistic fits and are often willing to work for less than their worth.

This phenomenon would not be quite as problematic if dancers and directors were nonetheless matched efficiently. Unfortunately, there are two major failures that plague the current system.

First, although many, but not all, major ballet companies in the U.S. operate under the dancers’ union AGMA, there is virtually no regulation in terms of hiring. Deadlines to hold auditions, renew or cancel contracts are company-specific and are not standardized industry-wide. This is problematic because when streams of dancers are released into the audition market at different times, both companies and dancers can end up with undesirable results.

...

"In other settings, centralized clearinghouses have been enormously effective in eliminating similar market failures. Specifically, what I have in mind is a variant that I’ve designed of the well-known top trading cycles algorithm. It would work something like this: After all company departures have been announced and auditions held, dancers and directors would simply submit their preferences to a centralized algorithm that would quickly determine final assignments based on those preferences. 

...

"Of course, centralized clearinghouses are most effective when the majority of the market agrees to partake in them. While leaders may fear that this would require them to relinquish some control, they would only make offers to the dancers who they would under the best possible scenario, and the gains they would achieve by thickening and coordinating the market would far outweigh any perceived losses.

"As new leaders begin to take the reins at companies around the globe, time will tell whether they will be brave enough to challenge the status quo and reshape the marketplace in a way that truly works for both dancers and directors."

HT: Scott Kominers

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The market for ballet dancers is tough in other ways as well, e.g. it's the rare dancer who finds her way to graduate school later. Many professional dancers never go to college. See e.g. (also in Dance Magazine)

What Directors Really Think of Ballet Dancers Going To College by Sarah Wroth

"In the ballet world, the phrase “going to college” is sometimes regarded as the musings of a dancer who’s not really serious about their craft. Although schools like Juilliard and Bennington College have made degrees acceptable for modern dancers for decades, the competitive ballet world (which often follows a philosophy of “the younger the better”) tends to discourage higher education."

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And this, from a story about a dancer with an unusually long and storied career who was able to make a post ballet career in contemporary dance:

When Ballet Is Your Life, What Does Life After Ballet Look Like? Wendy Whelan only ever wanted to dance. But what happens when you can't dance anymore?  by Chloe Angyal

 "Career paths out of ballet are notoriously narrow. Dancers usually skip college, and even the end of high school, to devote themselves to dancing in their late teens and early 20s, which means that when they retire from dancing, they’re out in the job market without an entry-level degree. Some dancers go on to teach or coach, and some to choreograph, though the latter path is often even less stable, predictable or lucrative than being a dancer. Some go into ballet-adjacent work, like dance photography. Some will be picked to run companies; Pacific Northwest Ballet, Miami City Ballet, Washington Ballet and Pennsylvania Ballet are all run by alumni of the New York City Ballet or American Ballet Theater. But there are only so many ballet companies to run, and turnover at the top can be infrequent."

The black market in looted antiquities

 The market for ancient art has a dark underside, that involves not just the usual shady characters we expect to encounter in black markets.

The Atlantic has the story, focusing on the law enforcement work of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the Manhattan District Attorney's office::

THE TOMB RAIDERS OF THE UPPER EAST SIDE. Inside the Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit. By Ariel Sabar

"When Matthew Bogdanos got a tip about a looted mummy coffin whose corpse had been dumped in the Nile, he approached the coffin’s buyer—the Metropolitan Museum of Art—with few of the courtesies traditionally accorded New York’s premier cultural institution.

...

"Bogdanos’s crackdown comes amid a broader reckoning over the West’s extraction of wealth from poor countries and people of color. The fiercest activists want Western museums to return all antiquities to their homelands, on the grounds that even legal acquisitions were tainted by colonial-era imbalances of money and power. Randall Hixenbaugh, one of Manhattan’s last surviving ancient-art dealers, told me that he has lost sales of well-provenanced objects, in part, he suspects, because sensational news stories have soured collectors on the entire sector. The push to make antiquities “unpalatable,” he contends, has less to do with the law than with an anti-European cultural politics.

"Particularly galling to Bogdanos’s detractors are his seizures of antiquities that have circulated, unquestioned, for decades. Among them is a 2,500-year-old limestone relief of a spear-toting Persian soldier, valued at $3 million. In 2017 Bogdanos removed it from an art fair at the Park Avenue Armory, as its enraged British dealer sputtered curses. The object had been owned by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts since the 1950s. Spurred by a tip from a scholar, Bogdanos’s team used archival records, decades-old photo negatives, and interviews in five countries to argue that the relief had been filched in the 1930s from an excavation in Iran. The British dealer and a colleague agreed to surrender the relief without admitting guilt, and in 2018, a New York judge ordered its repatriation."

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), in Harvard Business Review, by Kaczynski and Kominers

 Can a new form of property rights created by blockchains also create valuable new kinds of markets? Or even communities?  

How NFTs Create Value, by Steve Kaczynski and Scott Duke Kominers, Harvard Business Review November 10, 2021

Summary.   How much could a cluster of pixels possibly be worth? More pointedly, why is it worth anything at all? The explosion of NFTs and their accompanying marketplaces have left many baffled, incredulous, and deeply skeptical. But while NFTs may be fetching eye-popping, eyebrow-raising valuations, there is a logic to how — and when — they create value. By creating a system of verifiable digital ownership NFTs fundamentally changed the market for digital assets, creating the possibility for new types of transactions. Amidst a flood of new ventures, however, it can be hard to tell which are creating value and which are just riding the hype. The companies that have been most successful on this new frontier have a few things in common: They make meaningful use of the NFT technology itself, leverage a community of users, generate confidence that they can continue executing on the project to maintain ongoing community engagement, offer accessible “on-ramps” for new users, and are able to weather crypto market swings.

...

"Many emerging NFT applications, meanwhile, are seeking to more explicitly blend online NFT ownership with offline use cases. A few restaurants, for example, have started using NFTs for reservations. And the ticketing industry has a major opportunity here: By issuing tickets as NFTs, venues can give a variety of benefits to purchasers, creating more of an incentive to buy, as well as providing the venues an opportunity to collect royalties on secondary sales.

"Other companies are exploring how NFTs could be used in establishing and recording people’s identity and reputation online. MIT recently started offering blockchain-based digital diplomas, which are effectively non-transferable NFTs. Meanwhile, both established players like Facebook (now Meta) and new ventures like POAP and koodos are providing ways for individuals to create and share NFTs around activities, affinities, and interests."

Venus of Willendorf, on OnlyFans

 The NY Times has the story:

OnlyFans May Be a Refuge for Nude Fine Art. The Vienna Tourist Board has joined the adults-only site to display artworks that other social platforms have censored.  By Valeriya Safronova

"OnlyFans has a surprising new member: the Vienna Tourist Board.

"No, its account will not feature after-hours photos of employees. Instead, the board will use the adults-only site to show images of paintings and sculptures displayed in the Austrian capital that have been blocked by social media sites for nudity or sexual content.

"The offending artworks include the Venus of Willendorf, a 25,000-year-old limestone figurine of a woman. Facebook removed a photo of it from the Vienna Museum of Natural History’s page several years ago for being “pornographic.”

...

"Vienna is hardly the only city whose art has been censored online. Many artworks, from all over the world, have been incorrectly identified by A.I. as pornography. Facebook has taken down pictures posted by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (of Imogen Cunningham’s photographs of nude bodies), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (of a painting by Evelyne Axell in which a woman is licking an ice cream cone) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (of a 1917 painting of a nude woman by Amedeo Modigliani).

***************

Here's the Wikipedia page for Venus of Willendorf

The art of money laundering through the art market

 What looks like privacy to some looks like secrecy to others.

The NY Times has the story:

As Money Launderers Buy Dalís, U.S. Looks at Lifting the Veil on Art Sales. Secrecy has long been part of the art market’s mystique, but now lawmakers say they fear it fosters abuses and should be addressed.  By Graham Bowley

"Billions of dollars of art changes hands every year with little or no public scrutiny. Buyers typically have no idea where the work they are purchasing is coming from. Sellers are similarly in the dark about where a work is going. And none of the purchasing requires the filing of paperwork that would allow regulators to easily track art sales or profits, a distinct difference from the way the government can review the transfer of other substantial assets, like stocks or real estate.

...

"In January, Congress extended federal anti-money laundering regulations, designed to govern the banking industry, to antiquities dealers. The legislation required the Department of the Treasury to join with other agencies to study whether the stricter regulations should be imposed on the wider art market as well. The U.S. effort follows laws recently adopted in Europe, where dealers and auction houses must now determine the identity of their clients and check the source of their wealth.

“Secrecy, anonymity and a lack of regulation create an environment ripe for laundering money and evading sanctions,” the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said in a report last July in support of increased scrutiny.

"To art world veterans, who associate anonymity with discretion, tradition and class, not duplicity, this siege on secrecy is an overreaction that will damage the market. They worry about alienating customers with probing questions when they say there is scant evidence of abuse.

...

"What is the origin of such secrecy? Experts say it likely dates to the earliest days of the art market in the 15th and 16th centuries when the Guilds of St. Luke, professional trade organizations, began to regulate the production and sale of art in Europe. Until then, art was not so much sold as commissioned by aristocratic or clerical patrons. But as a merchant class expanded, so did an art market, operating from workshops and public stalls in cities like Antwerp. To thwart competitors, it made sense to conceal the identity of one’s clients so they could not be stolen, or to keep secret what they charged one customer so they could charge another client a different price, incentives to guard information that persist today.

...

"Auction catalogs say works are from “a private collection,” often nothing more. Paintings are at times brought to market by representatives of owners whose identities are unknown, even to the galleries arranging the sale, experts and officials say. Purchasers use surrogates, too. 

************

Here's a related State Department report on how art sales have been used to circumvent U.S. sanctions on Russian oligarchs:

THE ART INDUSTRY AND U.S. POLICIES THAT UNDERMINE SANCTIONS.  STAFF REPORT, PERMANENT SUBCOMMITTEE ON INVESTIGATIONS, UNITED STATES SENATE

Debating deaccessioning

 The museum world is divided about deaccessioning--i.e. selling art to finance things other than the purchase of more art, such as museum operations.

The NY Times has the story:

Selling Art to Pay the Bills Divides the Nation’s Museum Directors. Bitter debate has ensued as museum leaders around the country discuss whether to permanently embrace a pandemic-spurred policy that allows the sale of art to cover some operating costs.  By Robin Pogrebin and Zachary Small

"It started as a stopgap measure to respond to the pandemic, a temporary two-year loosening of an Association of Art Museum Directors’ policy that has long prohibited American institutions from selling art from their collections to help pay the bills.

"But more and more museums are taking advantage of the policy and the association began discussing making it permanent, an idea that, depending on which institution you talk to, either makes perfect sense or undermines the very rationale for their existence.

...

"The longstanding policy — enforced by the museum director’s association and widely embraced by its members — has been that the art owned by institutions was held for the public benefit and, as such, should be mostly retained.

"Some items could be sold — known as deaccessioning — but they were supposed to be artworks that were duplicative or no longer in line with the museum’s mission, and the proceeds were to be dedicated to the acquisition of other art, not to underwriting staff salaries or other operating costs.

...

"The stark differences of opinion among museum leaders were evident last week when the association convened two unusual, mandatory sessions to gather feedback from members about the rules for such sales.

...

"It’s difficult to say what would happen if the association pushed through a policy that was unpopular with half of its membership since issues that have divided museum directors at this level have been rare.

"Many have already lined up on either side of the debate. Campbell, who is now the director and chief executive of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, in an Instagram post warned that “Deaccessioning will be like crack cocaine to the addict — a rapid hit, that becomes a dependency.”

...

"Nonetheless, more than 25,000 people have signed a petition urging the Met to reconsider. “We call on the Met’s board to do the job they signed up for: to give, to support the institution,” says the petition, started by the art critic Tyler Green. “We call upon the Met’s senior staff leadership to resist any attempts to sell off the art the Met holds in the public trust.”

"Some museum leaders worry that donors will be less likely to contribute art if they fear it would be sold, or that formerly generous trustees, seeing the cash available from art sales, may become less likely to donate money."

The cost of a horse's smile (and the supply chain of chess sets)

 Among the pandemic shortages (along with toilet paper) are chess sets, whose sales have soared in response to the Netflix series "The Queen's Gambit." Chess sets, even wooden ones (as opposed to sets made of exotic materials), can be expensive. The NY Times explain why:

What Are You Paying For in a $300 Chess Set? Mostly the Knights.  The horses in higher-end wooden sets must be hand-carved, a long, specialized process to make sure all four are exactly the same.  by Sophia June

"If you bought a wooden chess set after watching “The Queen’s Gambit,” the price you paid was most likely dictated by just four pieces.

"The knights alone can account for as much as 50 percent of the cost of a nice wooden set. While the rest of the pieces can be machine-made, the knights are carved by hand to resemble the head of a horse, a tedious process to make sure all four are exactly the same.

"The knights in the set used in World Chess Championship matches ($310 for the pieces and $220 for the board) were inspired by a horse carving from the Parthenon in Athens, said Ilya Merenzon, the chief executive of World Chess, the company that licenses the rights to the matches. The process of creating the set when it was redesigned in 2013 required extensive back-and-forth communication with carvers in India to discuss minutiae like the horse’s smile.

"About 10 people specialize in carving knights for the World Chess sets, Mr. Merenzon said. It takes about two weeks to produce 100 sets, with a set of knights requiring about six hours to carve, he said.

...

"In the higher-end sets, “you can literally see the teeth carved into the horse’s mouth,” said Noelle Kendrick, the House of Staunton’s business development director. “They are extremely detailed. You can see the mane, the rivets of the mane, if it has a flowing mane.”

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***********

Here's a related article:

‘The Queen’s Gambit’ Sends Chess Set Sales Soaring by Marie Fazio,

and here's a blog post on Knights:

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Knight Management, and the Knight Way

Another art museum cancels sale of art in response to pushback

 The NY Times has the story about another last minute cancellation of a "deaccessioning" sale by an art museum:

Baltimore Museum of Art Cancels Painting Sale that Drew Complaints--The museum was prepared to sell three major works to pay for salary increases and to diversify its collection, but many critics disagreed with the plan.   By Hilarie M. Sheets

"The Baltimore Museum of Art is pausing its plan to sell three major paintings from its collection. A Sotheby’s sale of works by Brice Marden, Clyfford Still and Andy Warhol was estimated to bring in $65 million to fund acquisitions of art by people of color and staff-wide salary increases.

"The decision, on the day of a planned auction of two of the works, came after weeks of criticism from people who opposed the sale and hours after a conversation between leaders of the museum and the Association of Art Museum Directors, a professional organization advancing best practices for art museums.

...

"In April, the association loosened its strict deaccessioning guidelines for the next two years to help museums under financial stress from the pandemic by allowing them to sell works to fund direct collection care, not just the acquisition of other artworks. While the Baltimore Museum has a balanced budget, its director, Christopher Bedford, said earlier this month he saw an opportunity to create an endowment for collection care that would then free up money for salary increases — a vision-based initiative in line with his efforts to bring greater equity to both its collections and workplace culture."

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Recently:

Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Auction of art from Jerusalem museum postponed at the last moment

Auction of art from Jerusalem museum postponed at the last moment

The Guardian has the latest:

Auction for Jerusalem museum’s treasures postponed at last minute--Sotheby’s in London had been due to sell more than 200 items from cash-strapped museum  by Oliver Holmes 

The plan was that Sotheby's would sell a set of artifacts today from the Mayer Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem.

Select Works from the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art | Jerusalem--Live Auction: 27 October 2020 • 10:30 AM GMT • London (now postponed)

Unsurprisingly, this sale drew some opposition.

Here's the story from Haaretz:

Now on Display at the Jerusalem Museum for Islamic Art: Selloff--Financially strained, the L.A. Mayer Museum is auctioning off dozens of rare items, despite harsh criticism: 'They’re going for the easy way out'    by Naama Riba

Deaccessioning art in the time of corona virus--

 Art museums have long frowned on selling art from their collections, and have been frowned upon when they do so. (It used to be not ok to sell art, except to buy different art, but not e.g. to fix the roof over the art...).  That's changing, "temporarily," in response to the financial crisis museums are facing during the coronavirus pandemic.  (It will be interesting to see if the old repugnance prohibitions can be restored later...)

Here's an April story from the Washington Post:

This is how bad things are for museums: They now have a green light to sell off their art

By Sebastian Smee

"To counter the constant temptation to regard art works as a way to get quick cash, the museum world heavily polices the sale of works from permanent collections — otherwise known as deaccessioning. The powerful Association of Art Museum Directors, made up of directors of museums in the United States, Mexico and Canada, has long frowned on any museum that sells off art for purposes other than acquiring new art.

"AAMD’s frowns have an effect. Museums that dare to ignore its guidelines — as the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Mass., did in 2018, ultimately selling more than 20 works from its collection to raise money for a renovation — are censured, sanctioned and publicly shamed. For a renegade — or perhaps simply desperate — museum director, a decision to sell works from the collection, even if it’s to raise money deemed necessary for survival, might mean career death.

"However, in an unprecedented move, and as a direct result of the coronavirus pandemic, the AAMD has recently relaxed its guidelines. It’s too soon to gauge the effect, but it is already big news in the art world. Once unthinkable, the notion of selling off a Claude Monet or two to plug a budgetary hole — or to fend off a total financial meltdown — is suddenly something to contemplate.

"According to AAMD, museums may now “use the proceeds from deaccessioned works of art … to support the direct care” of their collection.

...

"AAMD says it recognizes “the extensive negative effects of the current crisis on the operations and balance sheets of many art museums.” It acknowledges, too, the impossibility of knowing when revenue streams might return to normal.

"The new guidelines are temporary, and are “not intended to incentivize … the sale of art.” But their effect may do just that."

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And, sure enough...:Here's the NY Times

Brooklyn Museum to Sell 12 Works as Pandemic Changes the Rules

Museums selling their art has long been frowned upon, but recent financial pressures have sent works to the auction block at Christie’s. The proceeds would pay for the care of the collection.

By Robin Pogrebin, Sept. 16, 2020

What can museums do with their excess art?

The NY Times has the story:
Clean House to Survive? Museums Confront Their Crowded Basements

"Fueled by philanthropic zeal, lucrative tax deductions and the prestige of seeing their works in esteemed settings, wealthy art owners have for decades given museums everything from their Rembrandts to their bedroom slippers.

"It all had to go somewhere. So now, many American museums are bulging with stuff — so much stuff that some house thousands of objects that have never been displayed but are preserved, at considerable cost, in climate-controlled storage spaces.
...
"“There is this inevitable march where you have to build more storage, more storage, more storage,” said Charles L. Venable, the director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. “I don’t think it’s sustainable.”

"His museum was so jammed with undisplayed artwork that it was about to spend about $14 million to double its storage space until he abruptly canceled the plan.

"Instead, it embarked on an ambitious effort to rank each of the 54,000 items in its collection with letter grades. Twenty percent of the items received a D, making them ripe to be sold or given to another institution.
...
"Part of the problem is that acquiring new things is far easier, and more glamorous, than getting rid of old ones. Deaccessioning, the formal term for disposing of an art object, is a careful, cumbersome process, requiring several levels of curatorial, administrative and board approval. Museum directors who try to clean out their basements often confront restrictive donor agreements and industry guidelines that treat collections as public trusts."
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Earlier related posts:

Sunday, January 7, 2018

More on the repugnance of selling art, if you're an art museum

Sunday, September 10, 2017

Why don't museums sell art (except to buy more art)?

More on the repugnance of selling art, if you're an art museum

In Philadelphia:
La Salle plan to sell museum masterpieces stuns art community

"La Salle University, which has struggled to plug a projected deficit in recent years, plans to sell 46 pieces of art from its prized museum collection to help fund teaching and learning initiatives in its new strategic plan, officials said Tuesday...

Approved by the school’s board of trustees and announced by university president Colleen M. Hanycz, the decision “is a strategic and good use of our assets,” university spokeswoman Jaine Lucas said. “We are doing what we feel is in the  interest of our students.”

It follows similar steps by other universities around the country in recent years to help stem financial woes — although some schools that have sold or attempted to sell art have faced challenges.

At Brandeis University in Massachusetts, a plan to close its museum and sell its art was reversed after backlash from students and faculty and legal action. Randolph College in Virginia was roundly criticized for its decision to sell a George Bellows painting worth more than $25 million.

The same controversy could follow the decision at La Salle, a 3,200-student Catholic university in Philadelphia’s Logan section, whose collection composes one of the most highly regarded university museums in the region. Just hours after the announcement, members of the local art community began questioning the decision."

From the NY Times: Art Owned by La Salle University Headed for Auction at Christie’s

"The process of selling art, known as deaccessioning, is a fraught one for museums; major professional organizations like the American Alliance of Museums condemn the sale of art to pay for expansions, physical repairs or ongoing expenses, as opposed to using the proceeds for the acquisition of other works or, perhaps, the care of a collection.

At times, government agencies that oversee nonprofit institutions have intervened to halt sales.

In 2009, for instance, the attorney general’s office in Massachusetts conducted a detailed review of Brandeis University’s unexpected announcement that it would shore up its struggling finances by selling all of the works––including those by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein––held by its Rose Art Museum, one of the most important collections of postwar art in New England.

Later four of the museum’s benefactors sued to stop any art sales.

That lawsuit and the attorney general’s investigation were both resolved in 2011, with Brandeis announcing that it had “no aim, plan, design, strategy or intention to sell any artwork donated to or purchased by” the school for the museum and that the Rose museum will remain a “university art museum open to the public.”