{"id":1842,"date":"2023-04-23T16:25:44","date_gmt":"2023-04-23T08:25:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/?p=1842"},"modified":"2023-04-23T16:25:44","modified_gmt":"2023-04-23T08:25:44","slug":"the-whitney-is-the-latest-museum-to-utter-the-d-word","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/artist\/the-whitney-is-the-latest-museum-to-utter-the-d-word\/","title":{"rendered":"The Whitney Is the Latest Museum to Utter the D-Word"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Edward Hopper, Cobb’s Barns, South Truro (1930\u20131933). Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.<\/span>COURTESY THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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Editor\u2019s Note:<\/strong>\u00a0This story originally appeared in\u00a0On Balance<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>the ARTnews\u00a0newsletter about the art market and beyond.\u00a0Sign up here<\/em>\u00a0to receive it every Wednesday.<\/em><\/p>\n

At the Sotheby\u2019s Modern Evening sale next month, an oil painting by Edward\u00a0Hopper,\u00a0Cobb\u2019s Barns, South Truro<\/em>\u00a0(1930\u201333), will hit the block with an estimate of $8 million\u2013$12 million. That work is one of eight on the auction docket in May owned by the\u00a0Whitney\u00a0Museum of American Art<\/a>,\u00a0<\/strong>which is also selling pieces of lesser value by Hopper, Maurice Prendergast, and John Marin.<\/p>\n

Yes, the Whitney is dabbling in\u00a0deaccessioning, the institutional art world\u2019s perennial bogeyman. Sell-offs have a tendency to evoke spite and bile among the art world\u2019s old guard. But, for many, it is now just part of a natural progression.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to grow the collection,\u201d\u00a0Jane Panetta<\/strong>, curator and director of the collection at the Whitney, told me over the phone last week. \u201cThis is part of hitting that goal, and it\u2019s a goal we\u2019ve had for a while, really since the museum moved to its current location in 2015.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe permanent-collection hang held following the Whitney\u2019s move to the Meatpacking District in 2015, \u201cAmerica Is Hard to See,\u201d was a catalyst that initiated the curators to look at the holdings anew, Panetta said.\u201d<\/p>\n

Panetta also framed deaccession as within Whitney\u2019s\u00a0founding principles<\/a>, in particular its mission to show work by living American artists. Changing the collection is about acknowledging that the America of today is starkly different from what it was decades ago, much less a century ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re always thinking about how one defines \u2018the museum of American art,\u2019 being mindful of wanting the collection to accurately represent the United States,\u201d Panetta said. \u201cWe think that means the collection has to evolve. We have to try and close critical gaps, and having endowment funds for acquisitions is a key means to doing that.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is not the first time the museum has grappled with what it means to be an American artist. During\u00a0Thomas N. Armstrong III<\/strong>\u2018s run as museum director in the 1970s and \u201980s, an artist without a US passport or a green card was not considered a true American, and the museum even considered deaccessioning works by artists without proper paperwork. One\u00a0near casualty\u00a0of that rule: Japanese-born artist Yayoi Kusama\u2019s 1962\u00a0Air Mail Stickers<\/em>. Luckily, the rule was ousted in 1990.<\/p>\n

Among the most vocal critics of deaccessioning has always been the prominent industry group\u00a0Association of Art Museum Directors<\/a>\u00a0(AAMD). While the AAMD has no legal power, it can and\u00a0has sanctioned museums\u00a0<\/a>that deaccession works for any reason other than bolstering their collection. An AAMD sanction essentially bans offending museums from loaning artworks, sharing resources, or engaging in other collaborative efforts with the association\u2019s member institutions.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, those in favor of deaccessioning, like San Francisco Museum of Modern Art director\u00a0Christopher Bedford<\/a><\/strong>, are often considered radical. In Bedford\u2019s previous position at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), he\u00a0came under fire\u00a0in 2020 for attempting to sell works, primarily those by white male artists like Andy Warhol and Brice Marden, for up to $65 million. That money was to be earmarked for \u201ccollection care\u201d and to acquire contemporary works by women and people of color, thus freeing up other money for salary increases. The effort was abandoned after severe pushback from BMA board members, staff, and art critics.\u00a0Los Angeles Times<\/em>\u00a0critic Christopher Knight\u00a0famously wrote\u00a0that the proposed sell-off made the museum \u201cthe leading poster child for art collection carelessness.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Bedford\u2019s predecessor at SFMOMA, Neal Benezra, was also a deaccessioner, selling off a cherished\u00a0$50 million Rothko<\/a>\u00a0from the museum\u2019s collection in 2019.)<\/p>\n

One can\u2019t help but wonder what Knight might have said to\u00a0Alfred H. Barr Jr<\/strong>., the first director of\u00a0MoMA\u00a0in New York, who\u00a0mandated that works in the collection\u00a0that were more than 50 years old be sold to other institutions, so that MoMA could acquire works by living artists and stay, well, modern.<\/p>\n

The writer\u00a0Ben Lerner,<\/strong>\u00a0whose most recent piece of fiction published in the\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>, \u201cThe Ferry<\/a>,\u201d touches on matters related to museum collections, has a theory similar to Barr\u2019s. \u201cA work of art or a library or museum collection or any significant form requires subtraction as much as addition, right? It requires omission, deaccession, etc., not just hoarding,\u201d he said in\u00a0an interview\u00a0with the\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Oddly, the 2020 Sotheby\u2019s sale in which the Baltimore Museum was to sell those works also included works from the Brooklyn Museum by Henri Matisse, Joan Mir\u00f3, and Claude Monet. And, while the BMA pulled its works two hours before the sale, the Brooklyn Museum did not. It wound up making around $20 million.<\/p>\n

Both sales were possible because the AAMD\u00a0relaxed its rules\u00a0in April 2020 around the use of \u201crestricted funds held by some institutions\u201d in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. While the association\u2019s rules didn\u2019t actually change, the group placed a \u201cmoratorium on punitive actions<\/a>\u201d \u00a0and granted leeway for using \u201cproceeds from deaccessioned art to pay for expenses associated with the direct care of collections.\u201d<\/p>\n

The AAMD codified that policy last year, permanently allowing museums to use funds generated by deaccessioned art for \u201cdirect care\u201d of objects in a museum\u2019s collection, with specific criteria for what constitutes \u201cdirect care.\u201d Selling work to offset operating costs or salaries is still taboo. On the task force that wrote the policy: Bedford, along with\u00a0Glenn Lowry<\/strong>,\u00a0director of the Museum of Modern Art.<\/p>\n

For those keeping track: Lowry and MoMA kicked off the last major news cycle about deaccessioning this past September, when Sotheby\u2019s announced it\u00a0was selling 80 works worth approximately $70 million\u00a0that had been on loan to MoMA since 1990.<\/p>\n

Not everyone was happy with AAMD\u2019s decision. In 2021\u00a0Erik Neil<\/strong>\u00a0of the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia,\u00a0said to the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>of the policy, \u201cif you want to flip paintings, there are many other types of institutions where you can do that, and they are called commercial galleries.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Whitney\u2019s deaccession plan may be in lockstep with AAMD guidelines, but then so was Bedford\u2019s BMA plan, and we know how that turned out. The Whitney artworks, according to Panetta, are only from areas where the museum has \u201cdeep holdings, where we have stronger and similar examples by the very same artists\u2014Prendergast, Marin, Hartley, and, of course Hopper.\u201d The BMA argued the same thing about its Warhol holdings.<\/p>\n

Still, Panetta understands why the idea of deaccessioning works is considered verboten. \u201cI think people get anxious with the deaccession because it seems to kind of undo that goal\u201d of the museum being a \u201cpermanent steward of the objects that it collects,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

While the Whitney plan doesn\u2019t include a monumental work analogous to the Warhol that the BMA attempted to sell in 2020, Hopper\u2019s name is all but synonymous with the museum. And while the painting going up for auction didn\u2019t make it into the museum\u2019s recent Hopper show, it did\u00a0hang in the Oval Office\u00a0during President Barack Obama\u2019s tenure, which should at least keep the bid cards waving come May.<\/p>\n

As to whether the sale will generate a backlash, we\u2019ll just have to wait and see.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Source: https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Edward Hopper, Cobb’s Barns, South Truro (1930\u20131933). Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.COURTESY THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART Editor\u2019s Note:\u00a0This story originally appeared in\u00a0On Balance,\u00a0the ARTnews\u00a0newsletter about the art market and beyond.\u00a0Sign up here\u00a0to receive it every Wednesday. At the Sotheby\u2019s Modern Evening sale next month, an oil painting by Edward\u00a0Hopper,\u00a0Cobb\u2019s Barns, South Truro\u00a0(1930\u201333), will hit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,13,7,4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1842","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-artist","7":"category-auction","8":"category-events","9":"category-gallery","10":"category-latest-news"},"yoast_head":"\nThe Whitney Is the Latest Museum to Utter the D-Word - Investable Art Auctioneer<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This story originally appeared in\u00a0On Balance,\u00a0the ARTnews\u00a0newsletter about the art market and beyond.\u00a0Sign up here\u00a0to receive it every Wednesday.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/artist\/the-whitney-is-the-latest-museum-to-utter-the-d-word\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Whitney Is the Latest Museum to Utter the D-Word - 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