Controversial Smithsonian Air & Space 2011 Military Unmanned Aircraft Exhibit

Editor’s Note: Here, Ken Yellis’ analysis of the museum world gains particular currency in today’s political climate: because, most recently, on Saturday, October 8, 2011, the National Air and Space Museum in Washington was closed after anti-war demonstrators swarmed the building to protest a drone exhibit. Security guards used pepper spray to repel them, sickening a number of protesters.

The museum’s exhibition, “Military Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” covers the history of unmanned aircraft and their current use as offensive weapons. Drones are often called the weapon of choice of the Obama administration, which quadrupled drone strikes against al-Qaida targets in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, up from less than 50 under the Bush administration to more than 220 in the past three years.

In an increasingly polarized political and social atmosphere of American values-in-transition, an exhibition of this kind can often serve as a hair-trigger for shaping public opinion. The questions surrounding the role of the museum, acting as a venue for an exposition of often-controversial facts—on display for public consideration—appears ever more cogent.

I have to ask myself: Did I let a teachable moment slip away? artes fine arts magazine

Col. Paul Tibbets, pilot of Enola Gay, plane that dropped atomic bomb on Hiroshima, waves from cockpit before takeoff, August 6, 1945. Source: Nat’l Archives

In my 2009 article, Fred Wilson, PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder], and Me: Reflections on the History Wars (Curator: The Museum Journal, 52:4, Fall, 2009), I predicted that an episode like the recent controversy about the National Portrait Gallery exhibition, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, would soon happen:

“The field has to find a way to heal our professional PTSD. Enola Gay [a controversial exhibition project, The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II, that roiled Smithsonian in the mid-1990s] was a cautionary episode. One of the lessons learned from it is that grappling with difficult and contested subject matter need not in itself be fatally toxic — but you’d better be ready. I think we are more wary, but I also sense and hope that we are lately showing a little more willingness to pick an occasional fight. The difference is that now when we go into the saloon, we make sure we are packing and that buddies have our back.”

A-Bomb exploding over Hiroshima, August 6, 1945

As it turned out, my optimism about how such an episode would play out was wholly unjustified. Hide/Seek demonstrated that in the current cultural landscape, you can’t just prepare for one bar fight and stay out of all the others: there are bars all over the place and the air is thick with truculence. To explore the Hide/Seek story in greater detail, a good place to start is the video of the morning session of a conference held on April 9, 2011, Hide/Seek: Museums, Ethics and the Press, organized by the Institute for Museum Ethics at Seton Hall University, available at http://www.museumethics.org/ . At this event, Sullivan described how NPG and Smithsonian prepared for a different fight from the one they found themselves in. The exhibition was intended to push the envelope on forms of gender representation. Smithsonian leadership had not anticipated that the envelope might push back on an entirely different subject: how religious symbols are used in art.

Poster Image of David Wojnarowicz (Silence = Death), Photo: Andreas Sterzing (1989)

A dimension of the story the conference did not fully address is what I have long considered the great unanswered—because unasked—question of the museum field: what do we mean when we make an exhibition? On January 20, 2011, the Huffington Post reported that Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough stated that he decided to pull A Fire in My Belly from the show, “because the controversy had overshadowed the exhibition and threatened to spiral beyond control into a debate on religious desecration.” Clough and the Smithsonian PR apparatus reiterated that mantra—one is tempted to say cover story—frequently over the following months. I am happy to report that if the removal of the abbreviated version of David Wojnarowicz’ video, A Fire in My Belly, was, indeed, intended to change the subject, Mission Accomplished.

(Editor’s Note: In December, 2010, a short, 4-minute edit of a larger film-work by late artist David Wojnarowicz was removed from the exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) after it was deemed objectionable by certain religious groups. The 4-minute film featured a 11-second sequence of insects crawling on a crucifix).

Once the video was gone, an entirely new—and potentially more productive—debate developed, centered on an issue Smithsonian was no less unprepared to address: will the Smithsonian—or any cultural institution dependent on taxpayer support—ever be in a position to defend the intellectual integrity of its work and, not incidentally, to honor its commitments to its lenders and private sources of funding?

The answer may turn out to be maybe. On the Smithsonian website, Clough reassured us that he is “committed to improving these processes so that this Institution can meet the challenges of its public mission, including our role in educating about complex topics that involve social transitions or incorporate, in art or objects, cultural or religious symbols.” Not so committed as to educate us about complex topics that incorporate in art or objects cultural or religious symbols in this case, it appears, but in a general way at some uncertain point in the not-so-proximate future, Smithsonian might be up for taking this on.

The B-29, Enola Gay. Part of mid-90s Smithsonian exhibit, The Last Act: The Atomic bomb and the End of World War II

Clough has said several times that if he had it to do again he would make the same decision “but…handle it better.” I suppose experience does equip us to screw up with greater efficiency and less collateral damage. But the Secretary may be wrong in both respects. A different process might well have produced a different disposition, however risk- and conflict-averse the decision-makers and fraught the political environment. For one thing, more of the consequences of caving might have been foreseen—and more allies might have stepped forward. For another, what’s the point of a different process if it doesn’t open up the possibility that you might wind up somewhere else? If Clough is right, however, to say that changing the process would not have produced a different outcome—except for making more people complicit in the decision—what purpose would changing the process serve?

In fact, there was a more deliberative process that might have been followed but was, instead, bypassed. My experience tells me that CEOs often get where they are in life because of their ability to take the hit now and move on, rather than subject themselves to what they perceive as prolonged agony. But future cases may have different outcomes for another reason: Clough and his successors as Secretary may find Smithsonian’s bureau directors less willing to allow their autonomy to be compromised, restoring something more akin to the power balance in effect in the Smithsonian of the 1970s. And there is some evidence that the Hide/Seek episode may have stiffened the Smithsonian bureaucracy’s backbone. The strident voices will not be stilled by attempts to mollify them—they will just find something else to complain about –and the Institution’s leaders may conclude that its support will prove sturdier and more robust if it were actually to stand for something—like, to pick a word at random, excellence. Pandering is no way to build a constituency and has no stakeholders.

It would be a pity if Smithsonian’s sole response to this faux-crisis proved to be organizational reforms, better internal communications, and a more resolute posture, however laudable those measures are. This, too, was a teachable moment when the spiritual dimension of Smithsonian’s work in the world might have been articulated and controverted, and the existing genuine constituency for that work bolstered. But that opportunity went un-seized and may not return; it is not for nothing that Gore Vidal calls this the United States of Amnesia. Still, it is not too late—or too soon—to prepare for the next time by thinking long and hard about that work.

Cri de Coeur and Battle Cry

When I submitted Fred Wilson, PTSD, and Me: Reflections on the History Wars, Curator’s Editor, Zahava Doering, asked, “Why did you write it?” I hemmed and hawed for five minutes without really addressing the question. The correct response would have been, “Beats me.”

The B-29 Superfortress, Enola Gay, with pilot Paul W. Tibbits, Jr. (1945)

But it was a fair question and one I still can’t really the answer. The essay had actually been gestating for a very long time. As it started to take shape, it became clear that it was at least in part about what happened to Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum’s proposed exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of the detonation of an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, The Final Act. The project, which most museum people refer to in shorthand as Enola Gay (for the airplane that dropped the bomb) and about which much has been written, triggered a lacerating controversy that inflicted deep wounds on the Smithsonian. Its effect on the museum community, especially on history museums—by far the most numerous kind of museum, by the way—was chilling. Most of us seemed to have decided to avoid bar fights by staying out of bars.

A few years later, moreover, in the aftermath of 9/11, the national narrative seemed to have become murkier and the role of museums in clarifying it more uncertain. In that stressed post-traumatic environment, it was hard to know what to say that would be helpful—and all too easy to say very little. But by the mid-2000s, I had started detecting a growing discomfort about this reticence and the hesitancy of museums to tackle big issues and tell big stories. This unease was accompanied by a greater readiness to attempt something that might be contested, to, in fact, provoke controversy.

Behind this, from an emotional perspective, was the fact that life in the DMZ was both boring and tense, warfare with all the terror and none of the glory. More importantly, we were learning that silence on matters of consequence only seemed safe and that we got no points for not ruffling feathers. On the contrary, by making the work of museums less socially relevant and culturally salient, we risked consigning our institutions to the margins of the national debate. That was unsustainable: we were better off under siege than ignored. If museums sought to demonstrate that they were necessary, they had to take risks. Otherwise, who cares?

If we cannot always anticipate what will trigger these fights, it may be in part because we are not sufficiently self-reflexive. Susan Crane has written that: “The unfortunate lesson of the Enola Gay controversy was just how little publics know about what historians ‘really do’…and just how little-used historians are to having to defend their interpretations before non-academic publics.” I think that’s true but I think further that the museum field needs to be clearer about what we think we are doing when we make an exhibition. If we were, we could embrace these fights as opportunities to spend our prestige on something worth buying: a firmer public understanding of our work and why it matters. That’s ground worth shedding blood for.

Fred Wilson, PTSD, and Me

Above: Baby Carriage with KKK Mask, Mining the Museum, Maryland Historical Society (MdHS),1992-3. See End Note 2.

Yale Peabody, Ken Yellis, Curator, 'Mixed Blessings: The Complex Social Life of Cliff Swallows' (1992). End Note #2a.

My essay attempted to contribute to this process by raising questions about the exhibition medium and the way it is practiced. Is there something about the nature of the medium, or something about the way museums go about doing what they do, or something about the relationship between museums and their visitors—or, perhaps, all three—that makes these outbreaks more likely and, perhaps, inevitable? What are we missing about what we do? What is it about our medium that we fail to understand?

Fred Wilson, Curator, 'Cabinetmaking 1820-1960,' MdHS. End Note #3.

My method was an extended compare-and-contrast discussion of two exhibitions, both a few years before the Enola Gay fiasco: Fred Wilson’s much-celebrated but also much-controverted 1992-1993 exhibition at the Maryland Historical Society (MdHS), Mining the Museum, and an almost exact contemporary, my own, little controverted exhibition, Mixed Blessings: The Complex Social Life of Cliff Swallows, at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. Both Mining the Museum and Mixed Blessings arose out of the same desire to challenge visitors. The fact that while both risked controversy, only one encountered any made the compare-and-contrast discussion a good place to start. The article’s second section, ‘Undermining the Museum,’ analyzed Wilson’s out-of-the-box methods and the theoretical issues they posed—the problem of memory and forgetting, the complex relationship and reciprocal responsibilities between institutions and their communities, the changing role of the museum, how museums can break through boundaries of presentation and chronology while being mindful of visitor expectations and needs, and more. (To follow that discussion, go to <<link>>.) The photos and captions that follow give a sense of the different ways in which these exhibitions challenged visitors.

Entrance, 'Mixed Blessings,' at Yale Peabody. End Note #4.

Though both Mining the Museum and Mixed Blessings were small exhibitions, both tackled big ideas. For Mixed Blessings that idea was trade-offs in nature. It had the potential to change the way visitors looked at the natural world: every characteristic and behavior of animals—or, for that matter, plants—would become the subject of the same sort of marginal utility analysis that cliff swallows do on the wing every day of their lives. If you looked at Mining the Museum with the same attention, it would erode some of the smugness or complacency you might feel about the American past. If you were a museum person, it was likely to shake you to the core and force you to confront the choices we make and the language we use. If, as I think and as others have said to me, people go to museums for insight and not so much for information, both exhibitions were worth the trip.

But only Mining the Museum aroused intense feelings among visitors, both positive and negative. There are several possible reasons for this, each of which may be somewhat true. One is the obvious one: nowadays, people are much less misty-eyed about nature than they are about the past. Mixed Blessings in presenting natural history unsentimentally, anticipated the approach that has become commonplace in museums and in other media, notably television. The settings may have played a role, too: visitors might expect uncompromising science in a university natural history museum.

'Truth and Metalwork,' Mining the Museum, MdHS (1992-3). End Note #5

But in an entity named the Maryland Historical Society they would look for a more traditional, even nostalgic or mythological, narrative about the past. It is pretty clear that, compared to natural history, the emotional stakes in public history are very high. Lisa Corrin, Wilson’s collaborator on Mining the Museum wrote that the exhibition “was about how deconstructing the museum apparatus can transform the museum into a space for ongoing cultural debate…. Our audiences told us that they want to be challenged.” But we know from the responses the Maryland Historical Society collected from visitors that at least some told them the opposite. And, as the feedback I received suggests (see below), Mining the Museum seems to have had more impact on how museum professionals think about their work than on how they actually practice it. It may be that in the current risk-averse environment, Mining the Museum remains a largely unrealized fantasy for museum professionals.

Cliff Swallow Colony, 'Mixed Blessings,' Yale Peabody (1992). End Note #6.

For many of us, too, the straightforward but hard-nosed approach taken in Mixed Blessings is more comfortable than the subversive, ironic and guileful cast of mind that created Mining the Museum. And there may be another reason why it is easier: while museums depend on text to convey their messages, lay people seem to understand intuitively that what exhibitions show is vastly more important than what they say about it. This disconnect, in my view, helps account for both the Enola Gay and Hide/Seek controversies—and it may be that to visitors the uninflected text and harsh view of nature in Mixed Blessings matched each other, so it was okay. Visitors, who live in the world, know that the impact of the visual cannot be wholly mitigated by explanatory text.

When we miscalculate this, we guarantee that the exhibition we intend will be very different from the exhibition the visitor experiences. I believe visitors telling us, either by their anger or their silence, that they come to exhibitions to have another kind of experience from what we typically offer. They are teaching us something about our medium that we ought to have known: that we are telling when we should be showing., that we are didactic when we should be seductive, that we are transmitting data when we should be offering insights.

Are our words saying one thing, our choices another? I think so and, apparently, I am not alone.

Image right: ‘Water Jug, Wicker Basket and Painting,’ Mining the Museum (1992-3), Maryland Historical Society. End Note #7.

Writing Fred Wilson brought two very gratifying rewards. One was the pleasure of working with Zahava, Curator Managing Editor Kay Larson, and the perceptive peer reviewers who read the piece to shape it into publishable form. The other was the response to the essay, the steady stream of scintillating and thoughtful emails and conversations.

One of the reasons for this latter phenomenon is that Curator is one of a small handful of museum publications able to accommodate long-form theoretical writing, a gap much felt by museum professionals. In the course of the correspondence, I was struck again and again by what my correspondents saw that I hadn’t quite seen:

The Carriage and the KKK hat were shocking, then put into context, but still not as shocking as the cliff swallows [in forced copulation] Image, left, Mixed Blessings (`92). See End Note #8.… When I first saw it, and read what it was supposed to be, it was disturbing on so many levels. At first, I thought it was just two dead swallows. That was upsetting enough. But when you read the explanation of their existence, the harshness, no beauty as I have been used to in my avid bird watching days. The savagery of the scene is adequately explained. But it does not take away the horror of that picture. It makes it worse.… When I compare the two exhibits, my first thought goes to your discussion of whether to read about the exhibit first, to be prepared, or to be given something on the way out so that you can digest what you have seen, have time to think about it.… My personal feeling is that I would get more from the Mining exhibit taking something to read away at the end. With your Cliff Swallows thou, I needed to have some kind of explanation as I looked at the picture.… I could not, however, have looked at the exhibit and then read about it entirely after I left. I would have missed much of the sensation that I think you wanted people to take away from the exhibit.

As a related outcome, since professional meetings have become so heavily programmed of late, there are fewer opportunities for conversations about these sorts of issues in general. In a series of workshops that Linda Norris and I conducted at conferences last fall, which grew out of an extended email exchange triggered by the article, we were thrilled by the eagerness of our colleagues to think about these matters. Fred and its companion piece, Cueing the Visitor: The Museum Theater and the Visitor Performance, which appeared in Curator 53:1 (Winter 2010), are now appearing on museum studies course syllabi as well, which is gratifying.

The correspondence and conversations suggest to me that a lot of us think or feel that the field is at some kind of a crossroads whose nature is unclear. At first, I was struck by the intensity, emotionality, and insightfulness of the responses. In re-visiting them for this article, however, I have been more moved by the powerful sense of loss and unrealized possibilities—although that sense was by no means universal. I should add, the same range of feelings ran through a discussion thread on the Museum Ethics Listserv that was in part a response to my article and from which I have taken some entries.

One media developer spoke directly to that sense of loss:

“I’ve been thinking about the sense of loss that I have developed during the birth of tech and a few things stand out. I think this sense of dramaturgy is one of the big casualties. In a world where everything is only two or three clicks away, we’ve lost a big chunk of time that focuses our thoughts, and organizes the drama of life experience. In the arts, it’s the loss of skillful narrative, good writing coming out of rigorous thinking, good films that play with the forms of storytelling (and last longer than three minutes)…. As someone who works in a media business I run the risk of being pegged as a dinosaur when I speak of the virtues of narrative film as opposed to web sites.”

Bull Snake Attacking Cliff Swallow Nest,' Mixed Blessings (1992),Yale Peabody. End Note #10

The internal dynamics of project development arose several times as a contributing factor, as these passages from several different correspondents indicate:

“I was lucky enough to see Mining the Museum and it left quite an impression on me as to what an exhibition could be.… I suppose that many of us wanted to use some of those subversive approaches in exhibits we were developing and designing- I know I certainly wanted to. But when it comes to actually putting those ideas into practice, it is far more difficult to get anything like that passed by a committee. There is nothing like a committee to drain an exhibit of poetry, dumb down an aesthetic and kill new ways of looking at things.”

“I recall casually strolling over there at some point during AAM…for a light break from all the hustle of the conference only to be floored by it all. The brave politics aside, I was simply thrilled to see each display as an explicit puzzle to be figured out, each with a clear ‘Oh, I get it!’ moment. I’ll admit that I even remember not ‘getting’ some stuff only to be clued in which was somewhat of a motivating challenge to ‘look closer’ at the other displays…. While most of our past projects have had comparatively tame themes over these past 25 years, I would like to think that they all have had explicit ‘concepts’ that are hoped to be uncovered by the visitor in some creative way.”

“Unfortunately, in museum schools or conferences or in our back rooms, there is too little awareness of how exhibition esthetics coupled with the excitement of intellectual discovery are a powerful combination. Museums ARE places to convey ideas to audiences in ways that are meaningful and engaging and sometimes uncomfortable and shocking. But in our desire to please, and plan by committee, and compromise, and to get things done with shrinking budgets, we’re not serving the public as well as we could. And many don’t seem to be aware of doing things any other way.”

Pikes Used in John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry and Reward Posters for Runaway Slaves, Mining the Museum (`92-3), MdHS. End Note #13

On the other hand, some of my correspondents and participants in the discussion thread were much more positive and inclined to be proactive about the state of the field in this respect:

“I can say that [Wilson’s] approach has directly changed the way I have worked as a curator and the way the museums I have worked in approach their exhibitions (temporary or permanent).… I believe viewers are often more ready to be challenged than museum staff give them credit for. In my experiences, the resistance more often comes from inside the museum (due to complacency, fear of risk, rigid departmental structures) rather than from audiences. I am a firm believer in providing viewers with an engaging and positive museum experience. But I also feel that museums must attempt to go beyond what audiences want or expect if they are really serious about ENGAGING their audiences. It is important to not only engage our audiences within their comfort zones but also to challenge them to exit their own comfort zones (which Wilson does) for deeper and meaningful learning. It is often in those locations of ‘discomfort’ that the most amount of learning needs to and can take place–and those locations can be frightening (both to museum staff and its audiences).…”

“[Mining the Museum’s]importance for me was in revealing that any artifact can be interpreted through different filters. In Film Studies, it is called ‘gaze’ theory — what you see depends on who is seeing it. When Wilson re-interpreted and re-exhibited the artifacts in Mining the Museum, he took the institutional authority away from the Historical Society and its traditional interpretations. But, he didn’t just use that borrowed authority to impose a[n] outside voice’s new interpretation. He challenged the visitors to interpret for themselves by provided two contrasting but accurate solutions to the ‘what is it?’ question. I found this very liberating as a fairly new museum professional. Looking back on the exhibit, I realized that it was liberating for the general audience as well. Much of the ‘imitation’ of Mining the Museum came in history sites and museums’ staff-led re-interpretations of collections away from “who owned it?” to “who made it?” or “who used it?” and the new value given to artifacts of slave and trade populations. There is also a new expectation in art and general museums for artist/guest curators. Rather than simply curating a show to reflect their tastes, they are now empowered to compile exhibitions from the permanent collections and interpret them in first person.”

'Nestling Covered with Blood-Engorged Swallow Bugs,' Mixed Blessings, Yale Peabody (`92). End Note # 14.

End of the Story—or not

So where are we?

Too early to say, I suppose.

Public Survey Responses, Mining the Museum, MdHS. End Note #15.

Because of the power museums are capable of exercising, it is appropriate and necessary that we have fights about what is presented there. Museums are, after all, where the national narrative is blocked out and staged and where our sense of the world is informed, if not shaped. “Perhaps,” Susan Crane writes, “we can also enjoy museums which confound and confabulate.” Perhaps, but the relationship between museums and their audiences has proved far more difficult to re-negotiate than we thought. We have learned to our regret that there is a torrent of rage and tears waiting to break through the fragile membrane of civility at any time.

Still, while for many museum professionals Mining the Museum has been a path not taken, for others, its rewards have transcended its attendant difficulties and risks. We are still aspiring to decipher what his methods reveal about our medium and its largely unrealized potential. So two years after its publication, Fred Wilson, PTSD and Me has made me more resolute in one of my core convictions.

It appears that for visitors as well as professionals museums can and should act as interlocutors between the past and the present, between ourselves and the other—and that we should be ready to take the consequences of doing so. After all, through our portals pass large numbers of people of diverse backgrounds and conditions and interests and learning styles. Their lives are in the process of changing, whether they know it or not; they are in the constant process of learning, whether they know it or not. Museums can, if we choose, assist in these metamorphoses by opening unseen windows on cloaked realities. Or we can retard them. Museum people, some of them at least, are thinking long and hard about who we are supposed to be in this moment. From my perspective, some at least have concluded we have the right and the duty to choose which role to play in this unfolding, epic drama.

By Ken Yellis, Contributing Writer

___________________________________________

End Notes

1. Fred Wilson (pictured left, in 1992) is an artist with an anthropologist’s cast-of-mind and a lot of experience working for and with museums. His exhibition, Mining the Museum, is only one of many he has created in a wide range of settings, but it has had by far the most impact on the museum community, at least in part because its installation coincided with the 1993 annual meeting of the American Association of Museums.

2. The methods Fred Wilson used in Mining the Museum challenged visitors to confront an uncomfortable reality without providing interpretive support or reassurance. Perhaps most upsetting was the placement of a Ku Klux Klan mask in a baby carriage, with a photo nearby of a black nanny caring for a white child. Randi Korn reports overhearing an angry mother saying to her daughter: “I don’t know why they put that thing in there.”

2a. Mixed Blessings started innocently with a flock of more than 150 sculpted swallows swirling through the gothic foyer of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, modeled on the donjon of the medieval Chateau Coucy. A Peabody curator observed that this was entirely appropriate since birds are commonly found roosting and flying in and out of castles, cathedrals, and other buildings.  Since coloniality was the main theme of the exhibition, it made sense that 150 cliff swallow sculptures would also usher visitors from the lobby, up the stairs, to the exhibition on Peabody Museum’s 3rd floor (see image, right).

3. Wilson’s ironically-captioned Cabinetmaking 1820-1960 juxtaposed Victorian chairs with a whipping post for disciplining slaves, making visitors unintentional witnesses of a historical crime.

4. The entrance to Mixed Blessings, conceived by exhibit designer Sarah Buie, frame the exhibition’s centerpiece, a detailed reconstruction of a cliff swallow community, built into the side of a bluff.

5. Juxtaposition and also irony are king here, too, as a silver globe and slave shackles are placed near a model of a slave ship in the Truth and Metalwork section of the exhibition. The visitor is confronted by the oppression that created the wealth that bought the silver.

6. The carefully re-created cliff swallow colony in Mixed Blessings—populated with the skins from the handful of ‘net kills’ (swallows accidentally killed during the course of the research project the exhibition was based on)—displayed the high price cliff swallows pay for living together graphically and unsentimentally.

7. Mining the Museum used typical museum exhibit strategies—object juxtapositions, labels, selective lighting, slide projections, and sound effects—subversively. Thanks to plantation owner inventory book found in the Maryland Historical Society archives, it was possible to add to a label for a rare painting of workers in the fields the names of the depicted slaves—listed in the ledger along with other household property and livestock. Nearby was a water jug and wicker basket some of them might have carried.

8. Another cost of living in a large colony—there are cliff swallow ‘cities’ of more than 4,000 nests—is reproductive interference, which takes many forms. In this scene, a male forces copulation with a female in a neighboring nest to his own, increasing the chances that his genetic material will be passed on and that another male will bear the burden of nurturing some of his offspring.

'Truth Trophy and Pedestals,' Mining the Museum (1992-93) MdHS. End Note #11.

9. “The term ‘mining’ in the exhibition title,” writes Noralee Frankel, “refers to Wilson’s culling of the MHS collections as he created the exhibition. It also suggests the intellectual land mines that place the concept of subjective reality before the visitor through the entire show.” The combination of a punt gun, duck decoys, a doll, and posters offering rewards for runaway slaves exemplifies both meanings of ‘mining’ at work.

10. A voracious bull snake invades a nest to devour eggs, nestlings, and adult swallows. Nests around the colony’s perimeter are especially vulnerable to this kind of predation, against which the birds have no defense.

11. Fred Wilson has said, “I look at the relationship between what is on view and what is not on view.” For him, the busts missing from the pedestals and the Maryland Historical Society collections—Benjamin Banneker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman—speak volumes about the museum’s unconscious assumptions about the past.

Swallow Destroying Egg from Neighbor's Nest,' Mixed Blessings (`92),Yale Peabody. End Note #12.

12. Many adult swallows remove eggs from neighbors’ nests and replace them with eggs of their own, letting unsuspecting adoptive parents pay the price of feeding their offspring.

13. Fred Wilson has said that “For me, juxtaposition is king. Context is king.” The placement of the pikes used by John Brown’s party in their raid on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry and reward posters for runaway slaves, whom Brown sought to free, illustrates this principle at work.

14. The highest price cliff swallows pay for their colonial way of life is severe victimization by a particularly nasty and prolific ectoparasite, the bloodsucking Cimicid swallow bug. The only defense the adult swallows have is to abandon the nest; chicks too weak to fly are left behind. The nestling in the photo has fallen out of the nest and is unable to get back in; it will succumb to the swallow bugs or be picked off by a predator.

'Swallow Watching Neighbor Feed Nestling,' Mixed Blessing (`92) Yale Peabody. End Note #16

15. Donald Garfield wrote that the title Mining the Museum “speaks of the effect of Wilson’s approach…to enable disenfranchised communities to at last call a part of the museum ‘mine.’” Randi Korn reported that in the visitor responses collected by the Maryland Historical Society. “There were visitors who were moved to tears by some objects and the meanings that had been hidden from view until now…. African American visitors [found] comfort in the thought that others will now know what they have known for years…. Visitors reported a range of emotions and realizations: some were saddened, some were angry.” Wilson’s colleague Lisa Corrin cited two particular visitor comments: “Mining the Museum has the ability to promote racism and hate in young Blacks and was offensive to me,” wrote one visitor. “I found Mining the Museum ‘artsy’ and pretentious,” stated another. “A museum should answer questions not raise questions unrelated to the subject…. It snookered me”

16. Aggression and strife, parasitism and predation are unavoidable aspects of colonial life, but for cliff swallows living in large colonies improves the survival odds for their offspring. As in the photo, swallows learn the latest whereabouts of insect swarms from their neighbors. In large colonies foraging cliff swallows collect 65 percent of their body weight in insects every hour to feed their young; birds living in solitary nests or small colonies do less than half as well. The more food, the faster nestlings grow, meaning that they will be able to leave the nest before the swallow bugs kill them and they will be strong enough for their long flight to South America at the end of summer.

A brisk mid-winter walk through the streets of lower Manhattan eventually led me under the iconic Romanesque arch that stands at the center of Washington Square. To my left, a uniformly-pristine row of Federalist-era, brick-and-columned town houses, standing like monuments to another, more gentile time. Over the years, NYU’s bustling urban academic community has emerged nearby. I first met Professor Moses in a small office, stacked high with art auction catalogues, at the University’s Stern School of Business, close to the epicenter of campus.    

 Opening Image (left):  All works pictured subject to Mei-Moses ® index analysis: J.M.W. Turner, Giudecca la Donna Della Salute and San Giorgio (1830-41). Category: Old Masters/19^th Century; Sales History (1897) $35,000; (2006) $35.8M. Annual Return on Investment (ROI) for 109 yrs, +6%.    

Overview    

My journey began with an invitation to travel to the city to learn more about the Mei-Moses® index, a cumulative, 13-year data set that has emerged as a reliable predictor for art portfolio development and investment planning strategies. Their objective in this project is to help prospective art buyers to move out of the purely emotional realm of ‘buy what you love’ into more objective criteria. Moses explains to me that, “the emotions that guide a purchase should not be discounted or dismissed, but to be aware that there is additional data available, before making a purchase at auction, that the potential buyer may want to factor in.” He point out that his Index is aimed at the following: fine arts magazine   

–Comparing art to other asset classes (stocks, bonds, real estate, other collectable);    

–Providing insights on financial performance of the art market, updated annually, while acquiring art for a portfolio;    

–Offering a tool to evaluate the role of art in overall wealth management and asset allocation;    

–Providing instant “mark to market” art valuations, with interim quarterly updates;    

–Evaluating market adjusted rates-of-return for individual, established artists.    

Titian, A Sacred Conversation-The Madonna and Child with St. Luke & Catherine of Alexandria. Category: Old Masters/19th Century; Sales History (1954) $1,632; Resale (2011) $16.9M. Annual ROI for 57 yrs, +17.6%.

 Since 1999, Moses and his colleague at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Jianping Mei, now Professor of Finance at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, in Beijing, have been compiling data that allows them to track the long-term performance of fine art. Their goal: to correctly analyze financial returns available on the art market. “It is important to remember,” says Professor Moses, “that art prices are ‘wealth bound’—the viability of a deal hinges on the size of the offer. Our model tracks those offers over time for ‘repeat pairs’; that is, the same item coming to market again, even years or decades later.”    

The Mei-Moses® indexes focus on mature artists whose works command prices from tens-of-thousands to millions of dollars at auction. They take the original purchase price at auction any place in the world and then the most recent sales price at Christie’s or Sotheby’s in New York and calculate an annual return for a single painting. This ‘repeat-pair’ method is key to their approach; i.e.- how an identifiable art work performs when it is brought to auction twice, with a minimum of one year lapse between sales. So, for example, a J.M.W. Turner view of Venice sold at auction at Christie’s in London on May 29, 1897, for $35,000 and then sold at Christies in New York in 2006 for $35.8 million—which yields about a 6 percent annual return for 109 years—an impressive return, in addition to the joy of ownership, for the generations who may have owned it during that period.    

Jacob Toorenvliet, Rabbinical Discussion. Category: Old Masters/19th Century; Sales History (1996) $18,400; Resale (2011) $104,500. Annual ROI for 15 yrs, +12.3%.

 To date, Mei-Moses® (with recent help from the ‘European Fine Art Database’) has compiled 26,000 such repeat-sale pairs, adding approximately 2000 incremental pairs annually, from recent auction transaction, for their ever-expanding indexes. Professor Moses explains that their data is based exclusively on Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction results, given that they represent established, recognized artists. They have broken out the historical periods of art being bought and sold into five over-arching collecting categories: beginning with Old Masters/19th century; Impressionist/Modern, American before 1950. They later added Post-War/Contemporary and Latin American works, the result of more adequate data in these last two categories becoming available for the period, 1988-2009.    

Where the rubber meets the road for the Mei-Moses Indexes is putting them to work in the competitive field of investment advisory and planning, exploring ways in which their indexes can influence buy-hold decisions, maximizing rate-of-return, while limiting down-side risk. Moses tells me that the auction market is the best setting to consider the investment potential for art, because of its ‘transparency’. “In an auction environment, buyer demand sets the value of a piece. The house or the seller may set a reserve, but, if it doesn’t sell, then it’s considered a non-revenue event, or marketplace failure. We only count successful transactions and, unlike a gallery, collection owner, or artist, setting a retail price that they believe the market will bear (‘non-transparency’), a successful auction sale is a true measure of value—a market-tested exercise in supply and demand. There are strong parallels to the stock market, here. If a stock is placed on the block for sale, with a limit order price, and it doesn’t sell, then it’s a non-event. Only when that stock sells at a price that reflects demand, does it become a financial event we can evaluate. For this reason (and others), the correlation between stocks, bonds and commodities becomes a powerful comparative tool for modeling the auction art market,” Moses says.    

But, unlike stocks and bonds, works of art are one-of-a-kind and need to be looked at on that basis. The closest existing model that accounts for the heterogeneity, or unique features of a sale item, is real estate. Moses explains that, “a new apartment building may offer a hundred units for sale, but some are higher up, some low, some face the city skyline, others the parking lot, and so forth. In other words—not all units in the building are comparable. The other factor to consider is supply and demand; that is, how many buyers and sellers are in the market at any one time. We all know that markets, and therefore pricing, are influenced by ‘bust and boom’ periods. These features affect asking price and ultimately, sale and resale price. We believe that the only relevant way to track the viability of money spent in a situation like that is to develop an Index that accounts for the individuality of unique objects, like residential real estate and art. The commonality between the two is due to the infrequency of trading and differences in the characteristics of the objects that come to market, from period-to-period.”    

Right: Clara Peeters, Still Life with Fish […] and Cat on Ledge. Category: Old Masters/19^th Century; Sales History (2008) $162,205; Resale (2011) $68,500. Annual ROI for 3 yrs, -25%.   

Thus for art and real estate, an index based on average prices over a period of time may be more dependent on the mix of objects that come to market rather than changes in the underlying market itself. A database of repeat sales of the same object resolves this issue. Thus, the statistical methodology used to create the Mei-Moses® indexes is similar to that developed by Professors Case and Shiller for their residential real estate index, published by Standard and Poor’s.    

As noted, to insure transparency (free-market pricing) for the Mei-Moses® indexes, only data from public auction results are collected. “We have looked at the New York art market, from Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction houses, starting our analysis with data from 1925, since that is the start date for the S&P 500 total return index, which we use for comparison purposes. For the five major art-collecting categories: Old Masters/19th century; Impressionist/Modern; American before 1950; Post-War/Contemporary and Latin American, we search the current sale catalogues for items that have sold. For those items which also have a listed prior-auction sale, we use our best research efforts to obtain the consummated prior sale price at any auction house, any place in the world and at any date. If the object has been held for at least a year and we have successfully found both the sale and purchase prices, including the relevant buyer’s premium, we include it in our database. Thus, we introduce no subjective sample selection bias.” Moses explains. “We start our current annual All Art index with data available from 1925. This index explains approximately 70% of the variability of a measure of the underlying returns of the objects on which it is based.”    

Pablo Picasso, Nature morte a la guitar, bouteille, verre de vin et journal. Category: Impressionist/Modern; Sales History (2007) $816,172; Resale (2011) $387,500. Annual ROI for 4 yrs, -17%.

 The compiled information allows for the creation of annual indexes for each of these period-specific collecting categories, as well as the All Art index. The data also allows Mei-Moses to develop insights into the factors that drive returns for individual or groups of objects. They also use the indices to undertake asset allocation studies, including art, as well as making available a ‘mark to market’ art valuation service. In 2009 they introduced a new feature allowing for the comparison of returns across important and highly traded artists.    

Modeling for Success    

Joan Miro, Tete bleue et oiseau fleche. Category: Impressionist/Modern; Sales History (2004) $621,758; (2011) $2.76M. Annual ROI for 7 yrs, +23.8%.

 The average investor maintains a diversified portfolio of equities (stocks), bonds of various types, commodities such as gold and cash in ratios that reflect desired return in exchange for exposure to risk. These investment instruments are considered ‘liquid’, because they can readily be converted into currency. Real estate, art and other collectables are ‘illiquid’ because the conversion cycle to currency is slower and product performance (average price) tends to be dependent on the mix of objects (supply) that come to market at any given time, as well as demand at the time (examples: the downward pressure on existing housing prices, given the number of foreclosures on the market today; the upward pressure on selected artists’ auction prices during periods when their work is in demand). “We were curious to see what would happen if we included relatively illiquid assets in a comprehensive portfolio management strategy. Our modeling assumed that, along with stocks, etc., most sophisticated investors would also own real estate as part of a long-term asset acquisition program. With the inclusion of the S&P/Case-Shiller U.S. Residential Real Estate Index and the Mei-Moses® art indexes, we could now foresee a means to incorporate art, along with other asset classes into a typical portfolio. We regularly evaluate rate-of- return, risk and correlation among other assets, over many time periods and holding periods. This detailed analysis allows investment advisors to have the analytical tools to guide their clients with a reasoned strategy for buying art or expanding an existing collection,” Moses says.    

The beauty and uniqueness of art as an asset class is that it offers the individual three distinct ways to reap the pleasure and excitement from ownership. The incomparable beauty and emotional appeal of art ownership is the first and most obvious one, especially when those works become part of one’s home or office setting. The second factor is the enjoyment most individuals derive from the process of seeking out and acquiring art. This includes, but is not limited to, knowledge acquisition, socialization with like-minded collectors and experts, the excitement of the chase, meeting artists and visiting studios, etc.    

The third beauty of art is its longevity and financial performance. For more than three millennia art has always been an important part of our cultural heritage. The passage of time is a key component to the analysis performed by the Mei-Moses® index. For each index, art’s relative performance is based on the historical time period under consideration. For example over the last fifty years the Mei Moses® All Art Index (a summary of the five categories under examination) and the S&P 500 Total Return Stock Index have had approximately-equal compound annual returns. The art index has underperformed the equity index for the last 25 years. Over the last five and ten year periods, art has significantly outperformed equities. “However,” Professor Moses explains, “for almost all these time periods, art has higher volatility and lower liquidity than most other financial assets. Conversely, art has low correlation with other asset classes and thus may play a role in portfolio diversification.”    

Joan Miro, Westvaco. Category: Impressionism/Modern; Sales History (2001) $32,950; (2011) $194,700. Annual ROI for 10 yrs, +19.4%.

 The paintings in the index aren’t all blockbusters. Moses estimates that the median size of recent transactions charted is about $200,000 or $300,000. As their most recent update shows, over the last 50 years, stocks (as represented by the S&P 500) returned 10.9 percent annually, while the art index returned 10.5 percent per annum. And in the five-to-ten years, art outperformed stocks. But not all art performs equally. In recent years, Old Masters haven’t done so well, while Post-War/Contemporary art before 1950 has been soaring—up 25.2 percent in the last year alone. And across categories, masterpieces tend to underperform lower-priced paintings by a substantial margin. Why? Like blue-chip stocks, well-known paintings by blue-chip artists are known quantities and offer safety and stability and their importance was well-known when they were previously purchased at auction. As with stocks, the greatest opportunity for growth in art values comes when investors suddenly focus their attention on a hot new sector or name. But Moses points out that it is not necessary to seek out the latest ‘hot artists’ in order to do well; the broader Mei-Moses® art indexes have historically generated returns that make them of interest in asset allocation.    

As noted above, there are some obvious differences between Van Gogh canvases and Verizon shares, having to do with liquidity. Art is far less liquid than stocks: You can’t simply push a button and sell a Picasso tomorrow. And while you might assume that the fortunes of the art market are closely tied to the fortunes of the stock market, Moses found that fine art actually has a very low correlation with stocks and a negative correlation with bonds. “In some sense, it’s a good portfolio diversifier,” says Moses.    

Like stocks, art is susceptible to fits of irrational exuberance. In 1990, Japanese executive Ryoei Saito capped off the Impressionist art bubble by paying an impressive $82.5 million for Vincent Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet. Between 1985 and 1990, the Mei-Moses® art index returned about 30 percent/ year—the same unsustainable rate at which the Nikkei grew in that period and at which the S&P 500 grew in the second half of the 1990s. Despite today’s huge prices, Moses notes, the mood surrounding the art market is nowhere near as exuberant as it was when Western Europe’s economic largess was flooding into Japanese corporate board rooms in the late ’80s.    

Critical Issues: Professor Moses Responds    

The Mei-Moses index methodology is not without potential shortcomings. Observers in the ‘art-as-asset’ world are quick to point out that the Mei-Moses indexes:    

Heinz Mack, Lichtpyramide. Category: Post War/Contemporary; Sales History (2005) $6596; (2011) $108,945. Annual ROI for 6 yrs, +59.6%.

1) Do not account for private treaty sales, a small, but important part of the secondary sales art market. Response: “True, but since there is no sale or purchase price transparency who is to judge whether the information being provided is factual and not subject to selection bias (stressing winners over losers) by the reporting firm.”    

2) Do not account for buyer and seller transaction costs in an auction house setting. Response: “True, but we started with the premise that we wanted to determine the return based on what willing buyers over time had paid for an object. Thus our return values are the upper estimate on net returns. In addition we should point out that we compare our results to those of the total return index for the S&P 500 where dividends are reinvested tax free and does not account for transaction cost which are diminemus now but were much more substantial years ago. Research has show that over long periods of time from 1/3 to ½ of the total return of the S&P 500 is provided by the reinvested dividends. However the round trip transaction cost of some 20-30% will substantially reduce short term holding period returns, making day trading all but impossible, but since the average holding period in our database is over twenty years our research shows that the average reduction caused by transaction cost reduces annual returns by less than one percent.”    

3) The indexes don’t consider art that comes to market, but doesn’t sell. Response. “True, but no one knows if this causes negative returns or positive returns that were just not sufficient to induce the owner to part with the work. We also fail to capture the returns of works the currently sell but had not sold the previous time it was offered. These would tend to offset some of the supposed negative bias of the works that did not sell. We also cannot study works of art that are not subject to public transparency.”    

Lucio Fontana, Untitled. Category: Post War/Contemporary; Sales History (2007) $50,173; (2011) $99,225. Annual ROI for 4 yrs, +18.6%.

4) That the implied returns of art ownership don’t adequately account for costs related to art ownership: insurance, storage, transport, conservation, and the like. Response: “True, but these costs for most collectors are deminimus. Insurance is less than ¼ of a percent in most residential settings. Most collectors store what they own on the walls of their own dwellings. These costs are also small compared to the management fee charged in many equity accounts.”    

5) That the database doesn’t account for the pieces that fail to sell on the auction block and are quietly unloaded for a loss in private sales, similar to those works previously addressed in issue #3!  Response:  “Additionlly however, we also do not study works that were bought at auction many years ago and are then given to museums.  These would tend to have high returns and tend to mitigate any of the downside of works that are dumped in private sales.  Once again however we cannot study what is not knowable and where there is no price transparency and potential selection bias.”     

6) That art is purely aesthetic and has no underlying value (like a stock’s corporate earnings) to insure performance over time and that art is subject to the whim of society’s taste-makers and therefore, is difficult to reliably evaluate, using standard metrics. Response: “Art is like gold which has very little underlying value and pays no dividend. Most of gold’s price is based on its supposed hedge against inflation or based on speculation. Our database of over 26,000 pairs over 150 years incorporates changes in style and whims over time since we have pairs that were part of every changing environment. Also for the last 3000 years there has always been, somewhere in the world, rich individuals who were exhibiting their wealth through the size of the domiciles and the art and furnishings that adorned it.”    

Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale. Category: Post War/Contemporary; Sales History (2006) $2.7M; (2011) $4.4 M. Annual ROI for 5 yrs, +10%.

In addition, Moses responds to all of these objections by pointing to his enormous data base. “26,000 repeat sale pairs cannot be considered an unrepresentative sample of what has gone on in the knowable part of the art market over the last 200 years. Not every stock that has a limit order on it, sells. In that case, my expectation as the seller is not satisfied. Why do we expect something different from the art market? We do not make the financial markets clear these limit orders at the end of the day; why should we force that on the art market? We eliminate selection bias by not just focusing on the high-priced ‘winners’ in the auction market, or the artistic superstars. By focusing on the ‘S & P’ of the art market, we capture performance data for 90% of the mature artists, whose work comes into the two major auction houses in the world and track their performance on a matched pair basis only. Not only are we comparing apples-to-apples, we are looking at the same apple, with a prior auction record, as it returns to the auction block after a minimum of one year in ownership hands. We eliminate quick turn-around, ‘day-traders’, where the owner is going for quick profit in an overheated market,” Moses emphasizes. “Our goal was to demonstrate that the broad auction market had sufficient financial performance as a whole, and did not require the collector’s ability to choose the outperformers to gain sufficient returns, to make art pay in a well-balanced, optimally-designed wealth portfolio.”    

As a result, Mei-Moses® can look at long-term performance for art as a legitimate part of a diversified portfolio that are realistic and achievable in the market. “Over the years, with the usual ups and downs, art performs at an average 9% rate-of-return. Some indexes claim 12, 15 or even 18% rates of return, but we have found those models to be flawed,” he tells me. “We believe that the only place to achieve this kind of return is in an auction environment, where the informed buyer observes one simple rule: the best returns, on average, are achieved when you never buy a work of art for more than the index-inflated price from the last sale—never buy a work of art for more than the index inflated price from the last sale. Knowing your facts, keeping emotions in check and flying by this rule will maximize (knowing there is no guarantee of future performance) your chances of doing well in a leveled playing field.”    

Lucian Freud, Self-Portrait. Category: Post war/Contemporary; Sales History (1992) $151,536; (2011) $5.26M. Annual ROI for 17 yrs, +20.5%.

Over the last ten years, the risk—or down-side exposure—associated with the Mei Moses® All Art index is less than that of the S&P 500 total return index, 14.4% vs. 20.4% respectively, and 17.6% vs. 18.3% respectively, over the last 25 years. We think this was caused by art’s methodical rise since the late 1990s, after a pronounced downturn in the early 1990s and then another pronounced drop and recovery over the last three years. Contrast this with stocks meteoric rise of the late 1990s and a slow recovery after the 2000-2002 down-turn, followed by substantial increases for a brief period, until the dramatic decline of 2008, returned it to 1997 levels, followed by last year’s recovery and a continuation of solid gains in 2011.    

However the downside risk for the equity index over the last 50 years, 17.2%, is slightly better than the art index, 17.8%. Over the past three years our results show that there has been a substantial reduction in the 50 year historic lower risk of equities over art (from a difference of 3-5% to the current 0.6%). The very low correlation factor between the art and stock/bond indexes for the last 50 and 25 years respectively indicated that art may play a positive role in investment portfolio diversification.    

“We are confident about the strength of our model after so many years and with so many repeat-sales pairs (26,000, to date with 2000 more added/year),” Moses explains. “Buying art for love is a perfectly understandable motivation, but the question has to be asked, ‘How much is love costing you?’ Approaching the purchase experience objectively doesn’t have to diminish the emotional charge that comes from acquiring art. Understand the metrics and variables that will increase the likelihood that your investment will hold its own over time. Know that masterpieces are exciting to consider, but are likely to underperform for the vast majority of buyers, over time. Focus on the mid-range, mature artistic community; buy at auction; which is the only truly democratic way to evaluate pricing dynamics; know the limit of value for each piece you bid—don’t bid beyond the index-adjusted purchase price from the last sale of that work of art; recognize that there is a painting for every purse and just because you didn’t pay too much for a painting doesn’t mean it won’t yield either joy or return-on-investment in the long run.”    

www.artasanasset.com -The Mei-Moses® Art Indexes© Web Site Summary    

Ross Bleckner, Untitled. Category: Post War/Contemporary; Sales History (2008) $49,900; Resale (2011) $16,200. Annual ROI for 2 yrs, -36.2%.

The Home page allows access to a selection of articles and interviews involving the Mei Moses® indexes and research results of Beautiful Asset Advisors®. Several thousand articles have appeared, using Mei-Moses® data since it first became available in 2001. A complete list can be found (enter “mei moses” as the preferred search object).    

The Home page also allows access to reactions to Mei-Moses® index research and to the website from art, insurance and financial market participants. Also, frequently asked questions (FAQ’s), such as: Why only use auction information? Why use a repeat sale methodology? Dealing with works that do not sell at auction; developing the optimal collecting category; lists of representative artists from each collecting category are also provides, as well as contact information and bios for the principals.    

Once on the useful Home Page of Mei-Moses®, Beautiful Asset Advisory, LLC, the website is organized into five additional sections:    

The Market Insights section contains the annual updates of our analysis of the New York auction market covering returns, risk, and correlation performance for art, as compared to other assets. It will also contain tracking reports issued in early April, July and November of each year, describing the progress of the market within that current calendar year. Any special research reports that might be of interest to subscribers, such as the analysis of financial performance of Matisse and Picasso created some years ago, during their combined show in New York, or the current relationship among art, equities and real estate, can be found there.    

Francis Picabia, Tete de Chat. Category: Post War/Contemporary; Sales History (1998) $3,612; Resale (2011) $19,000. Annual ROI for 12.5 yrs, +14.2%.

The Index Data section contains graphs for the All Art Index since 1875. Graphs for the All Art Index, as well as most of the collecting category indexes for the last fifty years are also available (Old Masters/ 19th century; Impressionist/Modern; American before 1950; Post-War/ Contemporary and Latin American [most recently, data on the traditional Chinese art market has been added]). Graphs for indexes based on special studies will also be available such as the one we created based on our analysis of purchase price and performance.    

The Asset Allocation Studies section analyzes the benefits of a diversified portfolio, including art. The risk-return tradeoffs of including art in a varied portfolio of stocks, bonds, cash and gold are illustrated. The section also visually demonstrates the optimal allocation percentages to these asset classes, at various return levels. Also demonstrated are optimal portfolio results for individuals with a fixed pre-existing art collection. The user gets to choose which art assets to include and which historical time period to use for historical performance.    

The Art Valuation section allows the user to employ an applicable Mei Moses® art index and a user-designated prior-purchase price or appraisal value to create a personalized current “mark to market” valuation level, based on art market changes over the intervening time period. This methodology may be useful in creating art valuations for potential object sales or insurance valuations of existing works in a collection, or price estimates for proposed current purchases at auction or from a dealer. Individual subscribers will be entitled to an unlimited number of valuations, per year, for their own non-commercial, personal use. Daily restrictions may apply however based on total volume of traffic.    

Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger. Category: Post War/Contemporary; Sales History (2006) $1.46M; (2011) $1.41M. Annual ROI for 5 yrs, -0.7%.

The Artist Returns section, new in 2009, provides information on the returns achieved at auction for the works of each of the 150 artist with the largest number of repeat auction sales represented in ‘repeat sale’ database. This is in the process of becoming the most comprehensive analysis of individual artist returns available anywhere. For each artist graphed, the compound annual return (CAR) of each repeat-sale pair, as a function of the year the work was purchased, is presented. Also provided are summary statistics on the mean and standard deviation of the CAR for all repeat-sale pairs, for works by these artists.    

The CARs for individual artists are not comparable because the repeat sale pairs have different ownership dates and holding periods. To enable an appropriate comparison between and among artists, we normalize the returns for each artist’s works relative to the broader market. We calculate the excess return for each repeat sale pair as the difference between the CAR of that pair and the CAR for our all art index over the same holding period, and calculate the summary statistics (mean, standard deviation) of the excess returns for all the repeat sale pairs of each of the artists analyzed.    

Recommendations to Portfolio Managers and Investors    

Investment advisors, typically unacquainted with the complex forces at play in the art world tend to shy away from discussions with their clients on the topic of their present art holdings or the reality of factoring in art acquisition as an integral part of their portfolio and wealth-building strategy for the future. Approaching the topic of art as an integral part of a diversified portfolio means having the confidence to engage in a meaningful discussion of the financial ramifications of the art he/she currently holds or is thinking of buying, knowing that there are tools available to help guide the process.    

Most high net worth clients will have some form of art as part of their holdings, along with other illiquid categories like real estate and other collectables (watches, cars, fine wines, etc.). Assisting the client to consider art as an important diversification strategy, by accounting for works of art currently owned, along with a proposed strategy for acquiring more art, while mitigating risk and building a realistic ROI, is an important way to strengthen the manager-client relationship. Mei-Moses® indexes provide a reliable and practical means to that end.    

By Richard Friswell, Executive Editor    

Jianping Mei, Ph.D. is a professor at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing, China, and co-founder of Beautiful Asset Advisors®, LLC; previously he was an associate professor of finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business.    

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 Michael Moses, Ph.D. is a co-founder of Beautiful Asset Advisors®, LLC; previously he was an associate professor of management and operations management at Stern School of Business.    

Editor’s note: This recent update appears on the Mei-Moses® Web site. Go to their helpful site for additional timely information: www.artasanasset.com. Readers may also want to request a free re-print of an article recently published in The Journal of Investment Consulting, entitled, “Wealth Management for Collectors” (2010). Contact Mei-Moses at support@artasanasset.com.     

CONTINUED FOURTH QUARTER INCREASES FOR MOST COLLECTING CATEGORIES ALLOWS THE MEI MOSES® ALL ART INDEX TO ACHIEVE AN ANNUAL RETURN OF 16.6% REVERSING THE ART MARKET SWOON OF LAST YEAR AND SURPASSING THE 15.06% INCREASE IN S&P 500 TOTAL RETURN INDEX FOR 2010©    

The 2009 decrease in the return of the Mei Moses® All Art index of approximately 23.5 percent was the largest decline in the all art index since the 1991 decline of 38.7 percent. The latter decline occurred after the bursting of the art bubble of 1985-1990. The 23.5% was the second largest decline since the great depression. The declines of 2008 and 2009 occurred after five years of positive annual growth averaging almost 20 percent. The 2010 results, an increase of 16.6%, has stopped this slide and may be the start of a new base building period for the auction art market. These results have allowed the all art index to slightly outperform the results for the of the S&P 500 total return index (where dividends are reinvested tax free) of 15.06%. In addition the most recent ten and five year compound annual returns (CAR) for art, 4.86% and 3.59%, exceed the S&P returns of, 1.35% and 2.28% respectively. Stocks outperformed art over the last twenty five years with a CAR of 9.91 percent compared to 6.43 percent for art. However, for the last fifty years the returns were very close with art achieving a CAR of 9.23% compared to the 9.73% for equities.   

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___________________________________________    

Additional Reading Material:    

Mei, Jianping & Moses, Michael. Art as an Investment and the Underperformance of Masterpieces. The American Economic Review, pgs 1656-1668, 2002.    

Mei, Jianping & Moses, Michael. Vested Interest and Biased Price Estimates: Evidence from the Auction Market, The Journal of Finance, V. IX, No. 5, pgs 2409-2435, October 2006    

Mei, Jianping & Moses, Michael. Wealth Management for Collectors. The Journal of Investment Consulting, pgs 50-59, 2010.    

Mei, Jianping & Moses, Michael. 2010 Year-End Market Insights Based on Mei-Moses Art Indexes. New York: ©Beautiful Asset Advisors, 2011.

I

(Above) Stuart Davis, (1894-1964) United States, SWING LANDSCAPE (1938), o/c, 86 3/4 x 173 1/8”, Frame: 88 1/2 x 174 3/4 x 3 ½”. Originally painted by Davis for the Williamsburg Housing Project, Brooklyn, NY. ©2011, Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, Indiana, #42.1. Photographers:  Michael Cavanagh and Kevin Montague fine arts magazine

Only then would I notice it, hidden in the shadows and veiled by the same ubiquitous gray that obliterated so many other features of this once-elegant building. Framed by dark walnut molding that coursed horizontally above a single door, marked ‘Postmaster’ in the center of the far wall, then moving upward at a forty-five degree angle from both sides to form an apex high above the floor, was a painted scene. Its colors dulled by years of neglect, I could make out a group of figures—Puritans by the look of it—the lead figure extending one hand toward a sundry collection of trade goods on the ground; the other upraised in the direction of a group of Native Americans, passive but cautious in the face of these strangers with their offer of uninvited largess. The scene appeared to represent, pictorially, my recollection of how my Connecticut city was once ‘purchased’ from the Pequot Indians, three centuries ago. Behind the gathering, the rendering ofa familiar landscape, marked by the convergence of three rivers and a configuration of rolling hills, mostly unchanged to this day.

I thought to ask myself at the time, “Who decided which scene should be painted here; how long ago was it done and who was the artist?” But, I must confess, the overall condition of the mural, the absence of dramatic lighting, or any signage describing its origins—together with the generalized indifference toward public art and its obvious Depression-Era stylistic influences—left most people, and me, cold.

As it turns out, the antidote for all of us, myself included, was the passage of time, a renewed interest in American art during the years leading up to and during the frenzy of World War II and—in light of our recent economic crisis—a fresh appreciation for the innovative programs that helped thousands and brought original art to hundreds of public places, like my once-regal post office.

A circa 1935 photo of FDR, rarely pictured in his wheelchair

Art had a friend in the White House in the 1930s. And it had the reluctant support of a divided Congress on how best to put America’s unemployed back to work. The Great Depression had taken its toll on everyday life, with snaking bread lines and desperate men selling what little they could offer on street corners, in every city in the country. Many had lost everything and hoped the government, under the newly-elected Franklin Roosevelt, could at least offer a hand up to a subsistence lifestyle. At the lowest point in the American economy, following the stock market crash of 1929, President Roosevelt proposed a far-reaching plan, as part of an omnibus recovery program, to put artists, crafts people and designers, among others, back to work in public spaces.

Coming into office in March of 1933, Roosevelt wasted no time implementing his economic rescue plan. The ‘New Deal’ was an effort to intervene in an unfolding economic disaster, quelling desperation and fear regarding rapidly deteriorating working and living conditions among a cash-strapped population. He believed that dependence on relief alone would destroy the American spirit and he mobilized the Congress to appropriate funds for a variety of infrastructure projects, including new roads, highways and public buildings. It is hard to imagine by today’s standards, with such skepticism and mistrust of the legislative process and the artistic establishment; but in the 1930s, artists and craftsmen figured prominently in plans to turn around the economic climate, while adding quality of life to the nation’s cities and towns.

Mount Rushmore's George Washington being maintained by WPA workers (1933-34). Courtesy National Parks Service, Mount Rushmore, S.D.

My source for understanding, in greater depth than the standard material usually available for examining the Federal government’s response to the crisis related to the artistic community, is William Barber’s, “Sweet Are the Uses of Adversity”: Federal Patronage of the Arts in the Great Depression (a complete citation appears at the end of this article). His title comes from Shakespeare’s, ‘As You like it’ and reads as follows: “Sweet are the uses of adversity/Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, /Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.” These words aptly describe the wealth of art and craftsmanship that arose from a program aimed at drawing on the talents and resources of a community of artists who, in today’s culture, would certainly be passed over in a search for solutions to our economic woes.

Barber cites the ‘Mexican Connection’ as he describes the inception of a work relief program for artists, conceived in the first hundred days of the Roosevelt administration. Artist and former Harvard classmate, George Biddle, prepared a memorandum for FDR, who was busy working out solutions for the country’s banking and manufacturing sectors. Biddle’s memo “reported that artists in Mexico had produced the greatest national school of mural painting since the Italian Renaissance’ and, though working at ‘plumber’s wages’, they had. “express[ed] on the walls of the government buildings the social ideals of the Mexican revolution.” He proposed a similar program for U.S. government buildings, using young artists, “eager to express their ideals in a permanent art form, […] convinced that our mural art with a little impetus can soon result, for the first time in our history, in a vital national expression” (Biddle, in Barber:236).

Under the president’s direction, Biddle set out to bring the program to life within the bureaucratic morass of the departments and under secretaries that typically stood in the way of this form of liberal policy implementation. His primary requirements for launching a successful program were: first-rank artists; assignment of wall space to express social ideals of the government and the people and; complete freedom of personal expression and technical execution.

Ross Dickinson (1903-1978) Valley Farms (1934) o/c, 39 7/8 x 50 1/8”. Smithsonian American Art Museum Transfer from the U.S. Department of Labor, 1964.1.40

Biddle had in mind a specific list of artists, among them: Thomas Hart Benton, Edward Laning, Reginald Marsh, Henry Varnum Poor, Boardman Robinson and Maurice Stern. He envisioned this core group of artists getting to work and creating a groundswell of public interest, with the help of the press, ‘liberal’ magazines and other organization devoted to the arts. His first obstacle was the civilian body created during the first Roosevelt administration in the early 20th century—the Fine Arts Commission. Tasked to oversee the ‘artistic merit’ of proposed government projects, the conservative commissioners saw little merit in the ‘modernism’ of the artists Biddle selected, or for their liberal social agenda. In the commission’s view, the mural project was “reactionary” and “unsound”. The project would have foundered on the administrative rocks of Washington’s politically-treacherous coast, except for the one key factor. Biddle was able to maneuver through the shoals of the larger national financial crisis, finding a way to have funds from a larger appropriation redirected to his small program. Just one-million dollars out of a 12-month emergency allocation of $400 million would be enough to put scores of artists to work, in the short term and provide proof-of-concept, in the longer range.

The man selected to run this project (Public Works of Art Project, or PWAP), was artist, Edward Bruce. According to Barber, “Bruce shared Biddle’s enthusiasms for promoting art with a distinctive American identity. There were fundamental differences in their approaches, however. Bruce was not attracted to the idea that public wall space should become a vehicle for social commentary.” Instead, Bruce wanted artists to assume the symbolic role of “spokesman for his community”, uniting Americans around a common cause and offering “powerful encouragement” through their work. “He preferred to see the national experience celebrated in ways that braced the country’s badly bruised morale. If things worked out the way he wished, government-sponsored art would educate and elevate popular tastes, thereby stimulating an increase in private demand for the artist’s product…he did not believe that painters and sculptors could expect government to be their principle patrons over the long term” (Barber:239).

Paul Cadmus, ‘The Fleet’s In’ (1933), Navy Art Gallery, Washington Navy Yard, Wash., D.C.

The PWAP program began to ‘hire’ artists that same day, after funding was approved—on December 9, 1933. The job description was clear: encourage works that interpreted the American scene and retain the services of the most competent artists, not just the neediest. By the time the program ended in the fall of 1934 (end of the federal fiscal year), more than 3,700 artists had participated, producing nearly 16,000 items of art (McKinzie:27). A public event was planned at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery at the end of the program, to demonstrate the success of the program to the public. Censorship nevertheless, came into play here, as well. For certain paintings, like Paul Cadmus’, The Fleet’s In (right), it was pulled because it depicted of drunken sailors arm-in-arm with women of questionable reputation (Editor’s Note: This banned painting served as inspiration for choreographer, Jerome Robbins’s 1944 ballet, Fancy Free; and in the same year, the Broadway show, On the Town, with music by Leonard Bernstein . Most memorable from the theatrical hit: New York, New York ["…the Bronx is up but the Battery's down"]). “Critics noted the absence of nudes, night club subjects, pretty women, aristocratic men and genteel houses. [Instead, there was a] preponderance of machinery: locomotives; steamships; workers and common subjects of village and farm life” (McKinzie:30). Because these works were paid for by public funds, at the end of the exhibition, Bruce freely presented paintings to the White House, various cabinet departments and to the House of representatives office building (Barber: 241).

WPA artist, Walter Speck, working on mural at Local 174, Auto Workers Union Building, Romulus, Michigan (1937) Photo: Worldwide

With the end of the year-long PWAP program came a new burst of energy by Edward Bruce and the politicians (including the president) who believed in perpetuating the program in some form. In 1934, the Congress approved a department within the Treasury’s Procurement Division, called the Section of Fine Arts. Bruce was named its head and he set about to use the one-percent of federal building construction and renovation funds set aside for art decoration to further the recently-expired working artists’ program. Imagine in today’s political environment, a federally-baseddepartment such as this, with a committee formed to mitigate the conservative influence of the Fine Arts Commission, consisting of two members of the president’s cabinet, the National Planning Board chairman (the president’s uncle), an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, as well as architects, leading museum directors, artists and sculptors!

The newly-formed Section of Fine Arts was to open the field for competition to complete murals in many of the building around Washington, as well as ‘Section’ funding for buildings in other parts of the country. The already esteemed list of artists was expanded to include George Biddle, John Stewart Curry, Rockwell Kent, Leon Kroll, Eugene Savage, Gant Wood and sculptors Paul Manship and William Zorach. Many ultimately chose not to participate, citing possible bureaucratic interference. Ultimately, more than 1,100 building throughout the U.S., in 1,083 cities and towns received the attention of these and 1200 other artists. More than half their works appeared in post offices and many of us, today (like this author in younger years), stand beneath these expertly-rendered—but often forgotten or overlooked—murals, reflecting a time in history and a view of the role of the artist in our everyday live, that thrived from 1934-43. Next time you hold a Jefferson nickel in your hand, recall that it was designed by a Roosevelt-era artist, working as a part of Bruce’s, Section of Fine Arts program.

Nils Gren, Oveture to Spring (1936). Coll. Jefferson High School, Portland, OR.

But the ‘Section’ project, as successful as it was, was overshadowed by the larger and much better known, Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Federal Art Program (FAP). Much more far-reaching that either the Public Works Art Project (`33 to`34), or the Section of Fine Arts mural and sculpture project (`34-`43), FAP was part of an omnibus spending bill launched under the Roosevelt Administration in 1935, to boldly accelerate the slowly-improving economy, as it emerged from the Great Depression. The program put millions to work, building dams, canals, roads and public buildings. He also approved Federal One, which consisted of the FAP, as well as theater, music and writing projects. Harry Hopkins, a former Roosevelt aide, headed the program, sharing the same aversion to the ‘dole’ that drove Biddle’s gestation of the ‘work relief program for artists’ in 1933.

Generously funded by the Congress, $3 million was allocated for the first six months of the project, allowing for the hire of 5,300 artists, artisans and craftspeople. WPA’s Hopkins turned to Holger Cahill, a New Jersey art collector and social theorist, to run the FAP. Cahill, a colorful figure, saw elements in the American culture of violence and vulgarity. He looked to art as a way of transcending the obscene into something beautiful (McKinzie:79). Cahill believed that patrons of the arts were still being held in the grip of European tastes and that, as a consequence, American artists had little opportunity to be understood and appreciated by their own nation. Hailing artists like John Sloan, George Luks and George Bellows for their, “rediscovery of the American scene” and “clear return to the interest of the average man” who had “brought the gusty vitality of city streets into the staid salons of the genteel tradition” (Cahill: 14-15).

Robert Muchley, Work with Care (1941), relief printing on paper, 25x 19".

Structured differently than previous arts programs, Cahill’s far-reaching vision was of an American cultural scene saved by government support and intervention, meaning that our cultural heritage would not die the same death, in the face of industrialization, as traditional crafts of Asia and India. He…”pledged that what had happened in Asian nations would not be repeated in the United States. It was altogether in keeping with this purpose that slightly more than half of those on the projects’ payrolls were “’craftsmen, workers in commercial and applied arts’, while slightly less than half were ‘working in the fine arts’” (Cahill, quoted in Barber: 247).

For several years, the FAP spearheaded the creation of and defined the foundation for future community arts education programs in the U.S. Within the FAP organization, there were several sections: art production, art instruction and art research. Mural painting and fine art paintings and prints continued to find their way into public building around the country; public art education was available for children and adults in community centers, principally in the West and South and nearly 1,000 artists were employed to conduct art research under the Index of American Design program, cataloging nearly 18,000 watercolor renderings of American decorative arts from the colonial period through the 19th century.

Frank Rudkowski, American Industry (1941), New Britain High School, New Britain, CT

By 1939, internal divisions and a debate over the degree of control the government should exercise over the output and standards placed on artists and the increasing strain of responding to a mounting global crisis resulted in a decline of interest within the administration regarding the future of FAP. In that year the management of the program was turned over to the states. After 1941, many of these same artists and draftsmen began devoting their time to the war effort. Posters and placards, civil defense pamphlets and rousing military music all managed to keep thousands of artists, writers and musicians busy during the early years of the war. By 1943, WPA/FAP had lost its funding and the monies previously set aside for this unique program (a total of $35 million over 10 years) were redirected to the war effort.

“But, during that period, a total of 2,250 murals were placed in public building around the country (courthouses, hospitals, schools, libraries and even Ellis Island); 13,000 pieces of sculpture were positioned in such places as parks, housing projects and historic battlefields; more than 100,000 paintings were created and placed on loan to public institutions and; nearly 240,000 prints from 12,500 original designs were also placed in public venues” (Dows, quoted in Barber:249).

“The experience of federal patronage of the arts in the Great Depression left no lasting mark on American institutions, but at least one aspect of the legacy is memorable. Thanks to government support, a number of major contributors to the American art scene kept going through some dark days; among them were Jackson Pollock, Ben Shahn, William de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, [Stuart Davis] and Arshile Gorky” (Barber:254).

READERS’ ALERT! How you can help…

Today, nearly seventy years later, a new effort is underway to account for and catalogue the paintings, prints and murals that were produced during the period 1933-1943, under the Public Works of Art Project (`33-`34); The Section of Fine Arts (`34-`43); the Treasury Relief Act Project (TRAP,`35-`38, not mentioned in this article); and Works Progress Administration/Federal Art Project (`35-`43). The U.S. General Services Administration’s Fine Arts Program (GSA) and the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) are working together to locate, identify and recover lost portable works of art produced by artists through the New Deal era art programs of the 1930s and early 1940s.

Mary De Neale Morgan, Trees on Coast (c. 1935). Courtesy of the Fine Arts Program, Public Building Service, USGSA.

When a new deal artwork is offered for sale and/or is suspected to be federal property, OIG should be notified. In conversation with program coordinators, Jennifer Gibson and Kathy Erikson, they explained that the notification can be made by anyone, including, but not limited to the Fine Arts Program, a private individual, a museum staff member, art dealer, appraiser or lawyer. The possessor of the work(s) is requested to maintain care and possession of the artwork until research about title is completed.

If the artwork is determined to be federal property, The GSA works with the possessor to return the work of art to federal custody, with the ultimate goal of having the artwork loaned to a qualified institution. Gibson points out that in some cases, works have been transferred with ownership of a commercial building or house and the owner might not be aware of the fact that art found in any given location still maintains government ties.

If you are aware of a New Deal work of art that may be federal property, please contact the GSA’s Fine Arts Program at wpa@gsa.gov or the office of the Inspector General at fraudnet@gsaig.gov. The OIG can make every effort to maintain the anonymity of those persons who provide information.

You may also write for more information to:

Fine Arts Program

Office of the Chief Architect

U.S. Government Services Administration

1800 F Street, NW

Washington, DC 20405

www.wpa@gsa.gov

By Richard Friswell, Executive Editor

__________________________________________

Bibliography:

Barber, William J., “Sweet Are the Uses of Adversity”: Federal Patronage of the Arts in the Great Depression. In Economic Engagement with Art, History of Political Economy, Sup. to Vol. 31, ed. by Crawford D.W. Goodwin & Neil De Marchi. Durham, NC and London: Duke Univ. Press, 1999.

Cahill, Holger, New Horizons in American Art, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936.

Dows, Olin, The New Deal’s Treasury Art Program. In New Deal Art Projects: An Anthology of Memoirs, ed. by Francis V. O’Connor. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1972.

McKinzie, Richard D., The New Deal for Artists. Princeton, NJ: Prineton Univ. Press, 1973.

I

Slung around the harbor and plaza side of the structure is a bulging swath of glass that cuts across the concrete mantel like a 3-D sash that terminates in geodesic knots, a nod to Teatro-Museo Dali in Figueres, Spain. Inside, this is the place to meet, a gathering spot for the photo op, perhaps the podium, or the bar, depending on the occasion. This cool windshield-like fixture admits as much light as it permits the gaze of the crowds to float outward onto the harbor, the airfield next door and the Verde Gris of Tampa Bay – a compelling vista.

Welcome to interior museum planning as of 1.11.11, when the Dali Museum opened: 68,000 square feet divided into public space, offices and last but not least, galleries. The Dali brand gift shop, where one arrives, is a surrealist chotztke paradise. Save for a greeter to point the way, one could wander there endlessly, perhaps taking a Catalonian bean soup and alighting in the adjacent open café for a glass of Rioja. If you remember why you came here, you may now buy your admission ticket.

With deference to Frank Lloyd Wright, you start at the top floor, awash in natural light. Ascending via elevator or a single helix stairwell – tight, when up and down visitors employ it simultaneously – one enters gallery spaces that may be cavernous or confined or both. The installation sweetly begins with the narrative of mega-benefactors A. Reynolds and Eleanor Morse, who befriended Dali, and their first acquisition Daddy Longlegs of the Evening – Hope! Arranged chronologically, the early impressionist still life work, nudes, (particularly Femme Couche, 1928), as well as landscapes notable for their oyster white light, are installed in close quarters that suggest nothing more than a high ceilinged storage area.

In 1925, Dali read Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams which catapulted his imagination, style and subject matter in new directions. At this point, the gallery space likewise opens up. Un Chien Andalou, 1929, an absurdist film made with Luis Bunuel is projected large-scale onto one wall of a vast rectangular space. So enjoyable is the phenomenon of viewing video in situ, that one never wants to enter a small darkened place segmented behind a curtain again. Sculptural objects co-mingle, like Venus de Milo with Drawers, 1936, (having white fur knobs), extending the cathartic relief of Surrealist humor to previously unrealized dimensions.

Augured by the seminal Nature Morte Vivante (Still Life – Fast Moving), 1956 the next paintings gallery heralds several key works, including the oft reproduced Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln – Homage to Rothko (Second Version), 1976 – which is also the collection catalogue cover, (by Robert Lubar); and the image adorning, for example, a hotel corridor at the Hilton in Pinellas Park, Florida.

The hauntingly powerful works, Old Age Adolescence, Infancy (The Three Ages), 1940, through The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, 1 952-54 – here the iconic melting watches; and The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, 1958-59 articulate Dali’s breadth of artistic concerns. But although there is breadth, there is not necessarily breathing. This installation does not permit the depth of perspective, the arc one of the peripheral walk, or the generosity of space that allowed one to absorb, much less luxuriate in, each work in the previous building. That generosity might now be called wasted space. Or perhaps, interest in this collection is simply greater than expected, and so one jostles for space.

The installation’s last progression – there are a total of over 2,100 phantasmagorical Dali holdings, so exhibitions revolve – is the “Nuclear Mysticism” period, the artist’s response to a perceived lack of spiritualism in Abstract Expressionism. (He felt a computer could generate a Mondrian or Pollock.) Monumental canvases like The Hallucinogenic Toreador, 1969-1970, which seems to hale Jim Dine’s Venuses, document the classicism, supernatural aura and transcendental concerns of Salvador Dali. What painter working today is consumed with reconciling the metaphysical with the political, scientific and the psychological?

Having broken early on from Andre Breton, Dali’s sweeping, alchemic worldview ultimately became self-referential, and simultaneously validated. When the artist consolidated his works in the Teatro-Museo Dali in 1974, diametrically opposed events unfolded: his beloved wife and muse Gala died; King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia became honorary patrons of The Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali; and Dali was honored with the Grand Cross of the Order of Charles III, the State’s highest award, all in 1982 – the same year the Salvador Dai Museum first opened in St. Petersburg Florida.

Beyond the kitsch, the caricature and the reputed 400 blank pieces of paper Dali signed – or because of it – this prolific artist’s oeuvre is accessible. Diverse mediums such as holograms, jewelry, film, sculpture, painting and works on paper, represents exactly what the artist sought—an amalgam, a holistic view and a way of seeing things. Take a look at the influence in fashion, personified by the apparition Daphne Guinness. Such creative whimsy filled the crowds on opening day at The Dali Museum, when a Dali impersonator and a Salsa band sizzled on the outdoor plaza with rhythm and beat beneath this latest signature piece. The ingrained dance steps of well-dressed patrons patterned the sunlight and suggested that it’s this composite that will likely succeed – and outstrip its predecessor – not solely as a museum with a great biographical collection, but as a fascinating cultural destination. Does the building become as iconic as the artist?

The artist and building converge into a seamless whole, a Dali universe. 40,000 visitors have toured the museum since it’s opening last month. One Saturday alone recorded 2,300 guests. With over a $1,000,000 in revenue since 1.11.11, this Dali Museum generated a quarter of the annual revenue above its previous location. Surrealism is getting real; its imagination and lofty ideals got packaged here with zest and panache, without the pretense, and coalesced into the intuitive experience one craves.

By Diane Dewey, Contributing Writer

Tony Oursler, H2Out (2006) Fiberglass, projector, speakers, flash media player 55"x42"x32". Lehmann Maupin Gallery, NY

New England’s harsh winds and beating rain seemed to be conspiring against me as I rushed to the airport, for a flight that I hoped would not be cancelled or delayed. My ultimate destination was 1200 miles away and much warmer—opening night of Art Basel/ Miami Beach. Carried up by a gust of wind, my umbrella turned inside out, as if to punish me for not wanting to remain and enjoy Mother Nature’s celebration of the changing seasons. Determined, and with 100,000 square feet of art awaiting me, I braved the elements, a crowded and chaotic scene in the New York airport where I transferred to another flight; ultimately stepping into the sultry air of Florida, my art fair destination the only thing on my mind. fine arts magazine

Maimi Beach at night. From Miami Beach Real Estate, Inc.

Ah, intoxicating Miami! For the next week, this celebrity-filled event will hold enough contemporary art, host enough VIP parties and project enough glamour to earn its reputation as the country—if not the world’s—hottest art fair. Approximately 250 galleries from the U. S., Europe, Latin America, Asia, India and Africa are showcasing paintings, drawings, sculpture, photography and prints, by 2,000 of the world’s pre-eminent contemporary and modern artists. I noted a fair number of galleries from Russian galleries are here, too. While still gaining a footing in the fast-moving American market, the stats suggest that it was exposure, not sales per se, that was their primary motivation for exhibiting.

The gallery scene is dominated by international ‘super dealers’ like Gagosian, who have managed to attract talent and generate enough buzz to electrify Miami Beach’s Convention Center. A gateway to the emerging wealth of Latin America, Art Basel/ Miami Beach gives galleries both strong sales and tightened relationships, not only with serious collectors who come year after year; but, access to a new brand of collector. New wealth is being seen in emerging markets, primarily Latin America and Asia. Brazilians, in particular, were being seduced by marquee names in the art world and emerging artists alike, accounting for an unusually-high percentage of sales, across all categories.

Alex Guofang Cao, Angela vs. Brad (2009), chromogenic print. ChinaSquare Gallery

With attendance at more than 46,000 visitors, the mood at this year’s fair was remarkably upbeat, especially given the current volatility of the capital markets, the Euro-crisis and geo-political tensions in Asia. Before the event opened, Chinese artist, Alex Guofeng Cao, was in demand, as proven by the sales of seven of his prints ranging from $7,000-15,000 by New York’s ChinaSquare Gallery; a sculpture by Anish Kapoor fetched $220,000 (represented by Munich dealer, Gallery Terminus) and a Basquiat drawing sold for $85,000. Nick Komiloff, Director of Art Miami told artdaily.org. (‘[...]celebrates’ 12.2.10), “Interest in masterworks from marquee artists is a strong indicator that people are looking for quality and extraordinary pieces this year. There is also a noticeable trend in Latin American and Chinese artists…”

Indeed, it is this search for quality for which, as a financial advisor by day, I, too, am always prowling. Post-financial meltdown, post-art market crisis and just barely the Fed’s second round of quantitative easing—and with bond prices falling, investors desperately searching for yield and, no doubt, the Silver Bullet—I scouted the Art Fair, to determine if I was literally surrounded by an asset class that could drive profitability in a portfolio: contemporary or modern art, by the best that the world has to offer.

Sean Kelly, a New York gallery owner, believes that collectors are putting more money into art now, because Wall Street has let them down. “We are benefitting from the trust being placed in us, “he claims. Fair Co-Director Marc Spiegler said : “Of course, the blue chip work, the work that if you don’t buy now you’ll never have access to again, will move, in the same way of course that some young artists will be favored. But, I think, what we have seen in the last two years, with the economy being different, is that people are really focused as much on the mid-career artists as the young artists” (artdaily.org. ‘[...]collectors’, 12.2.10).

Andy Warhol images of Marilyn Monroe, always in demand, like this image, similar to one on dislay at Aquavella Gallery, NY

Warhol wrote that ‘business art’ is the best art. How could he have possibly predicted the staggering values, even for his own works, seen in today’s market. Real estate mogul, Aby Rosen, said that “art has tremendous asset potential. All the other luxuries depreciate, and art is one thing that has the potential to appreciate.” (NYT, ‘Where Art[…]’, 12.10.10) While differing in this assessment (Steinway pianos and vintage luxury watches both refute Rosen’s claim, for example), I do agree that art has a place in every investor’s portfolio (as do Steinways and vintage luxury watches.) Collector Beth Rudin DeWoody, who happens to collect the work of several of my artist-friends, asks: “Where else would you put your money, if you are still solvent and you are still buying?” (NYT, ‘Where Art […]’, 12.10.10) While dividend-paying stocks come to my mind, I would personally collect great art, if I were a member of this stratospherically-rich jet set, too.

What I believe is that, as in Modern Portfolio Theory, a diversified art portfolio is every bit as valid as a diversified portfolio of intangible assets. Just as I would add international and emerging markets equities to my clients’ portfolios of domestic stocks and fixed income instruments, serious art collectors are adding Latin American, Chinese, African and other emerging artists to the marquee artists already in their collections. The established collectors, with their solid base of classic modern and contemporary art, are the same who had the foresight, thirty years ago, to start collecting emerging Latin American, European or U.S.-born artists and are also tracking today’s crop of art ‘rock stars.’ An equivalent position in a stock and bond portfolio might be a blue chip, high growth company like Apple; go back a bit further and look up the price-per-share of Intel or IBM, and see what you could have earned had you picked up and held onto these for the past thirty years.

Evan Penny Old Self (Portrait of the artist as he will not be), silicone, pigment, hair and fabric, 33"X24"X39" (2010)

Older, established collectors scan the globe, looking for emerging talent—nursing their passion for art objects—and attempting to satisfy their obsession to own these works. Collector Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, a native Venezuelan and Founder of the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, in an interview and panel discussion held at the Fair, admitted to originally collecting only Latin American art. But, as time passed and her tastes evolved, she eventually stepped into the global arena in her search for contemporary art. Her collection, while steeped in art from Venezuela, Brazil and Peru, includes art found on her global travels. This strategy adds rich flavor to her extensive portfolio, while mitigating risk at the same time.

Ms. Fontanals-Cisneros also noted that art and philanthropy go hand-in-hand more readily in the U.S. than in Latin America or some European countries, where tariffs and a private arts culture weigh heavily on collectors. Moving art into and out of these countries is difficult, to say the least. Added to these barriers is the lack of government-sponsored tax breaks and broad political support and you get an increasingly complex art arena in which to do business.

The difference today lies, perhaps, with the new breed of collector, who tends to buy emerging artists or even mid-career artists, at the expense of or to the exclusion of the more established names. I believe this new breed—hedge fund managers, media moguls and athlete or entertainment celebrities—tends to focus their collections on emerging artists, because they have an intuitive (let alone, experiential) familiarity with recognizing and rewarding fresh, young talent. Let’s not forget the lessons taught by the Internet, reality-television and instant sports celebrity: new talent, once it goes ‘viral’, has monetary potential limited only by one’s wildest imagination. Think Britney, Miley, Tiger and Paris!

Darren K. Johnston, General Partner, The Arts Fund and Artist Mindy Linkous at the W South Beach "6 on 12" party. Painting is her iconic Sinatra Gleason. Acrylic on canvas.

As the parties revolving around SoBe attested, this art fair inclines towards the young and the restless. Youthful-looking collectors, pushing babies in expensive strollers and conversing intelligently with dealers about expensive pieces (mostly in Spanish and Portuguese), were everywhere. Cleverly playing to a youthful audience, an iphone 4 mobile app available within the show allows you to identify artists by simply scanning the work of art into your phone. And, according to the numbers, this particular clientele was buying.  Remember that at the Basel events, in particular, only 1% of attendees actually purchase art! 99% of attendees are on the art interest scale of vague-to-genuine; they are equally, if not more, interested in the culture of the fair.

And in Miami, culture pervades. At the Art Basel Miami Beach’s VIP Preview Party, celebrity and Miami culture vultures co-mingled with art dealers, collectors and the art they represented. While wading through the indoor and outdoor sculpture exhibition and video show, In What We Trust, guests nibbled on hors d’ oeuvres by Spuntino Catering; martinis from Miami’s Bootlegger Martini Bar and espressos from Segafredo Zanetti Espresso, syncing perfectly with the South Beach vibe.

Later, at a private party poolside with executives from Creative Time, the public installation people, some of us gathered around the Hanukkah menorah, imbibing vodka and latkes and paying homage to the Jewish traditional holiday occurring during the same week as the show, in the name of, ‘tis the season’. When combined with the glamour of this tropical, outdoor paradise, one would be hard-pressed to agree which culture– the art culture or the party culture–prevailed, particularly for that 99% non-collecting set.

Robert Malmberg, The 3rd Eye, collodion print, 24"x36" (2010)

One of my favorite after-parties was held at the W South Beach, where Arts Fund intersected two of Miami’s most alluring asset classes: waterfront real estate and emerging art. A third class—high fashion—was represented by the leggy models that, I assumed, were hired just to show up at this event. My friend, an art agent, argued that Miami doesn’t need to hire beautiful young women dressed to kill, as they are as ubiquitous in the city as mojitos and sunshine. But for the event, ‘6 on 12’, curated by White Walls Gallery, these three asset classes prevailed, cloaked in edginess and an abundance of polite air kisses. The W took six of their multi-million dollar waterfront units on the twelfth floor and filled them with showcase artists Eddie Colla, Casey Gray, Hush, Mindy Linkous, Robert Malmberg and Kofie One. Beautiful residential real estate brokers lounged with guests on white sofas and attempted to talk art, but what they really wanted to do was entice you to re-position your assets into SoBe property. Indeed, the view out the balconies was tantalizing, especially if the unit held unobstructed vistas of water along with glimpses of Creative Time’s outdoor art installation.

Then it was on to the Wolfsonian Museum, where hard bodies shoved against hard bodies, all vying for the elevators to see the art upstairs. I found their gift shop to be a fascinating and thought-proving bonus to an enlightening evening, and spent quite a bit of time there. Picking up a book on Cuban art and culture for my Cuban-born husband made my day.

In the end, when all was said and done, it should be noted that Art Basel/ Miami Beach is about exceptional quality and global representation. For my three-day investigation, I happily ate pre-dinner finger foods, in party rooms filled with strangers. But for dinner, we went with the tried-and-true. On my last night there, Joe’s Stone Crabs, was the destination I shared with my closest friends and hosts for my stay. For Joe’s, a Miami Beach institution, is still in the blue chip sleeve of any diner’s restaurant portfolio. It continues to pay dividends long after the meal is over.

The Great Recession, most arts professionals would agree, brought prices of contemporary and modern art down to more realistic levels. Those of us old enough to remember the 90’s remember, all too well, the dotcom ‘bubble’. Students of art, serious collectors and investors of art owe at least a few of their lessons to Wall Street. Real value and exceptional quality has its place in the art world. And if Art Basel/ Miami Beach stood for one thing, it stood for that.

by Carolina Fernandez, Editor-at-Large

*After the title of a well-known book about investing: Burton Malkiel. A Random Walk Down Wall Street. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co. (2007)

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Bibliography

1. “Art Miami Celebrates Opening Night with Marquee Works Drawing Large Crowds and Sales.” artdaily.org, December 2, 2010.

2. “Collectors from Around the World Gather at Art Basel Miami Beach as It Opens Its Doors.” artdaily.org, December 2, 2010.

3. Trebay, Guy. “Art Basel Miami Beach: Where Art and Commerce Come Together and Party.” The New York Times, December 10, 2010.

Jim Dine, Viennese Hearts V (1990)

Experts who deal regularly in the art world, as auctioneers, appraisers, dealers or collection consultants share a common assumption that is not widely recognized in the extended world of art appreciation: that is, that art is a commodity like any other (oil, precious metals, corn, etc.) and, in certain broad terms, that it will behave on the open market like any other commodity—responding to the exigencies of supply and demand. Among a number of the components that separate art markets from commodities or financial securities markets, however, is the subjective element of emotional or aesthetic appeal. Art is viewed as an ‘investment’, of sorts. But for most buyers, the long-term value of the purchase will be measured by the pleasure of waking up each morning to see a painting, print or sculpture adorning the walls of one’s home. “What I did for love” is a phrase that won’t apply to too many decisions we make in our lives, but art purchases (with abject disregard for monetary appreciation of the object) is often and repeatedly, one of them. fine arts magazine    

Economists and art market-watchers have, of late, been intrigued by the trends in art purchasing, in auction houses, galleries and the secondary (re-sale) market, in the face of the recent and protracted global financial down-turn. Record prices are being fetched for important or rare works by some of the world’s leading artist of the last century or two. The market for Old Masters is also enjoying resurgence. Companies like Art Index, a Moscow and New York-based firm has been aggressively tracking market trends and reporting out on sales activity for thousands of artists whose work finds its way into public sales venues. For the last several years, New York University’s Stern School of Business professors, Michael Moses and Jiangping Mei, have been compiling data that allows them to track the long-term performance of fine art. The Mei Moses Index focuses on mature artists whose works commands significant prices at auction. They take a formulaic approach to comparing the current and original sales price of a work of art (even if that price is several decades, or even more than a century old!) to calculate an annualized rate-of-return.    

Pablo Picasso, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust (1932), sold at Christie's London auction recently for record $106 million

These companies also consider new ways of looking at art acquisition, given sky-rocketing prices for the limited number of currently-prominent and historically-important artists as their work becomes available, by variously offering, on-line and annually-updated print publications, summarizing the latest trend charts and tables of recent sales and metrics regarding past performance for the world’s top artists, as well as analysis of recent purchasing events in various international locales.    

Amazingly, interest in art as a centerpiece for an investment portfolio is not an entirely new idea. Daniel Gross, reporting in the June 21, 2006, on-line issue of Slate Magazine, ‘Painting for Profit’ (Is art a wise investment?) wrote that, ”In the 1970s, the British Rail Pension fund, with Sotheby’s assistance, famously committed about $70 million to fine art. The huge portfolio [ultimately included] works by Canaletto and El Greco and proved quite profitable—a compound annual return of 11.3 percent between 1974 and 1999… Britain’s rail workers were fortunate that the fund chose to cash in a bunch of Impressionist and Modern works at the height of the bubble in April 1989.”    

More recently, a number of researchers have initiated innovative programs that examine art-buying behavior in more objective terms—that is, by considering the commodities nature of the investment—whereby an investor group might attempt to leverage objective data with a clearer understanding of how art values are structured and impacted by forces like supply and demand, world financial markets and buyer behavior. Asset management firms like the London-based Fine Art Fund, created by a former Christie’s executive and the Artist Pension Trust, where artists contribute their pieces, to be pooled with those of other artists and then receive a stream of income down the road as the trust sells their pieces, continue to function. Another fund from a decade ago, Fernwood Art Investments, created by a Merrill Lynch executive and a veteran of Sotheby’s, never got off the ground.    

Gross also notes in the ’06 Slate article that, “[Interest in art as investment] is not surprising. Sure, the data shows that art performs well as an asset over time. But for the wealthy people expected to invest in these funds, much of the satisfaction of buying (or investing) in art is being able to hang it on your wall and show it off. Someone who is willing to commit a few hundred thousand dollars to art would probably be more likely to go buy paintings at Christie’s than invest in a private equity fund that buys paintings at Christie’s.”    

Duke University campus, Durham, NC

Nevertheless, companies like these, founded during a peak in art auction sales in the early 2000s, have continued to track art sales performance in various parts of the world, in an effort to develop economic models that can assist portfolio managers to securitize, index and structure art sector funds, with the goal of making the pooled-purchasing power of works of art, by a targeted investor-class, practical and profitable.    

Increasingly, experts in the field of economics, finance and art collecting are pooling information to investigate logical, factually-based approaches to art acquisition as an asset. Topics such as art securitization, asset management and global art market monitoring, index tracking and collective purchasing models for art, by established and emerging artists, are being factored in. This is a promising new field with a body of research now made possible by available computer-driven financial modeling methods and academic research that, in decades past, had been available.    

Two academicians interested in this topic are Neil De Marchi, Professor of Economics at Duke University, and his long-time collaborator and colleague Professor Hans Van Miegroet, Chair of Duke’s Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies. Together they lead the Duke Art, Law & Markets Initiative, a new project conceived to investigate the factors that impact on art-buying behavior. I spoke with professor De Marchi about the historical and theoretical economic underpinnings of an approach to art valuation that emphasizes the subjective pleasure buyers can take in the art they buy.    

RF- If I have this right, you and your colleague have been focusing on the ways in which art can be treated like any other commodity or asset class; effectively working toward the creation of a sector fund, similar to any other mutual fund, focused on a particular category. Are there economic models that are sophisticated enough to target value and predict potential future performance for works of art?    

Brussels historical tapestry, story of Perseus, (third-quarter 16th c.), 11’7”x 10'7”.

NDM- Indexed funds of carefully-defined and narrow segments of the art market are becoming more common, though auction price indexes of various categories of art and the artists who make it have been around for decades. The narrowing to a manageable number of artists who have enjoyed frequent exposure at auction and done well in the market, makes sense. Nonetheless, art is very different from the financial instruments that can be rendered substitutable one for another in derivatives markets, just as art auctions, which occur at discrete time intervals, differ from the continuous-time global markets for financial assets. There is a fascinating tension at work here. There are lots of grounds for being cautious about predicting art values at market. At the same time there are lots of reasons for thinking that unusual gains can be made. For example, information in art markets is often exclusive property, not openly shared, hence an advantage to some, not all. Moreover, transactions costs in buying and selling art are significant, though often negotiable. And art, as is well understood, is illiquid, which implies that if one ‘must’ buy there will tend to be an extra premium, and if one must sell, possibly a strong discount. Timing, then – and having the time – is everything. So the problem is not that unusual gains can be made in art, but that it is difficult to predict and difficult to control all the conditions that make it possible to reap those gains. Everyone knows these things, but we are learning more about them all the time, and the search for tangible assets such as art that might offset some of the movement in the other assets in a portfolio, is a strong lure. A safe prediction is that there will be lively discussion among experts about such matters. Art-as-asset has a long history.    

RF- No doubt, yet acquiring art for art’s sake seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon, historically. In an article by James Bloom, in the volume you edited with Hans Van Miegroet, ‘Mapping Markets for Paintings in Europe, 1450-1750’ (Brepols, 2006), he points out that, with the decline in tapestry production for wealthy patrons from the late fifteenth century, Flemish dealers began to market less expensive versions of figurative scenes on stretched linen, not least to Florentine clientele. ‘Collecting’ in the sense that we understand it today was still not de rigueur, but increasingly, influential Italian patrons included works on linen as an integral part of their aesthetic holdings. Bloom writes, “The wide array of social function manifest in collections such as those of the Medici include decoration, devotion, collection and curiosity. Flemish panels [on wood], of smaller format, [were] appreciated as jewel-like curiosities, kept in leather sleeves or boxes to be viewed as precious objects rather than hung as wall decoration” (pg 27). How do you view this historical trend, and what it can teach us about the intrinsic investment value of art?    

The Habsbourg collection (Ger.,late 18th c.). Dense mix of Schools and painting genres without regard to historical sequence achieved more decorative than collector effect in homes, public settings.

NDM- What you are referring to is an episode in which a lot of subject-matter that had been associated with tapestry was borrowed and became matter for paintings – in Bloom’s story, for paintings on linen but also for small panel paintings. It is true that both thin linen and small wood panels were cheaper than labor-intensive tapestries; but you are right, Bloom stresses not so much this cost element but that these substitutions with borrowed subject matter became something like a celebration of painting in and of itself. It was unexpected to find all kinds of subjects, some not quite seemly, packed together and perhaps highlighted in a distinct space. Their comparative cheapness made such paintings affordable to more people, but presumably the delights of depiction per se was a large part of what made paintings desirable. And, of course, once pleasure-yielding but otherwise largely useless things like hung paintings came to be bought – for all the reasons Bloom lists – but also, in time, exchanged, the question arises, what is the value of an object whose appeal is specific to a person? Some of its appeal must be shared by a new owner, otherwise it wouldn’t be bought, but the appeals to each cannot be compared; all we can observe is the amount of money that changes hands, and this might mean different things in terms of the pleasure the seller took in it and the new owner takes. Even if these were equal we could not tell. Economists would like to say the value is what someone is willing to pay, but this seems to miss something. This may be part of why deaccessioning paintings by a museum often causes so much distress: it is felt that something may be lost to future others whose valuation is unknowable yet ought not be dismissed. It might also explain the long history of attempts—not only by economists—to find some more objective measure of the intrinsic value of art.    

Roger de Piles, Grappe de Raisin or ‘Titian’s rule’: observing in paintings ‘unity of object, skillful coloring to constitute harmony in art.’

The 17th century French critic and art advisor, Roger de Piles (1635-1709) created a scheme – admittedly tongue-in-cheek – that assigned numbers to the qualitative elements that made a painting a painting. Employing four characteristics commonly regarded as defining paintingness – design (drawing), composition, coloring and expression – de Piles assigned a number to each on a scale of zero-to-twenty, for 56 well-known though dead painters. This did not solve the problem that the appeal of art might be a strictly individual matter; instead, de Piles interposed between individuals and their subjective valuations the critic’s measure of quality. This might be acceptable to many individuals if it expresses the prevailing expert judgement and they are willing to defer to the experts. Nevertheless, it doesn’t address the specificity and subjectivity of the pleasure taken in art. Rather it just changes the question.    

There is, however, an approach that addresses head-on the question of personal pleasure. This has roots in eighteenth-century discussion of the sentiments, among others by the moral philosopher Adam Smith, held in regard by many as an economist. Smith stressed our love of variety and craving for novelty and talked about properties of common goods, but also painting, sculpture and architecture, such as form, coloring, uniqueness, in terms of complex combinations of properties such as simplicity mixed with variety. Too much simplicity bores us yet too much variety stresses us; we should aim then at a happy medium, though without thinking that is the best position. It is not, because repetitions of the same diminish our pleasure. Such is the force of our desire for novelty. Smith’s views were summed up in something known as the Wundt curve, after a psycho-physicist of the late nineteenth century, and revived by the experimental psychologist Berlyne in the 1960s and 1970s.    

W. Hogarth, ‘Enthusiasm Delineated’ (1761), depicts art auctioneer as Methodist preacher. Send-up of Roger de Piles's notorious, ‘Balance des Peintres’ (1706), scene filled with symbolic references to his method of comparing artworks.

I find the Smith-Wundt-Berlyne tradition important because it takes seriously the fact that a lot of our pleasure in art is private and subjective. On the face of it it seems we have wandered far from your query about intrinsic value and (though you didn’t quite ask this) how, if at all, it relates to market price. Professor Van Miegroet and I have borrowed from this tradition and from a modern economist by the name of Lancaster, who suggested that we do not buy goods as such but we purchase bundles of characteristics that we find appealing. Our twist on this is that paintings too can be thought of as bundles of characteristics or attributes, and small family clusters identified in many cases where artist and price differ but the several paintings involved offer comparable bundles of pleasure-yielding attributes. If a potential buyer or collector can articulate his or her preferences and is willing to consider alternative artists and paintings to get value for money, then an art advisor can often suggest several choices. This approach uses market prices but also addresses directly individual pleasure, so it deals with the concern you voiced by uniting private valuations, on the one hand, with market prices, on the other. So, not a 17th century model, but an 18th century one becomes a useful array for comparing and contrasting art today!    

RF- By applying a list of objective criteria into the mix, we seem to be turning the value proposition in the art world on its head. The critic, the appraiser, the collector, the auction house audience—and their response to an artist’s oeuvre or individual painting—all appear to operate in a free market. We know that auction houses have a long and checkered history. Several contributors to both your ‘Mapping Markets…’ volume and your edited publication, Economic Engagements with Art (Duke Press, 1999), write that early auctions held in 17th and 18th century Europe were unregulated and chaotic affairs, where market values were laid claim to by vaguely-defined ‘authorities’, with limited and ill-defined criteria. Buyers, new to the art collecting field, consisted of a mixture of the newly-emerging leisure class and people of the middling sort: financiers, traders, professionals and some artisans and shopkeepers (Brian Cowan, Economic Engagements…, Ch. 13). Much has changed in today’s market, but there is the same push-pull between the in-house auction appraiser and the dealer/collector-driven retail market, when it comes to establishing and preserving value for any work of art or artist. As an economist, how to you see value/unit-cost being managed in a marketplace where the sought-after object is grounded in what, Seven Days in the Art World, author Sarah Thornton called, “an economy of belief” (pg 11)?    

This etching of a Christie’s auction in late 19th c. London reflects more order, systems and trust in methods for public sale.

NDM- Adam Smith, speaking of art works that were in limited supply, dubbed their prices ‘fancy’ prices, not anchored in cost of production but in desire, limited only by wealth. It is certainly the case that fancy prices can be manipulated, and the list of prevarications, sins of omission and commission by various players in modern art markets is long and well known. Much behavior of this sort can be interpreted as actions necessary for survival in a market where capital must be committed but under conditions of greater uncertainty, since there do not exist the same insurance possibilities other hedges as are available in financial markets. Some are due as well to the peculiarities of art, which is unlike, say, stocks in obvious though essential ways. Smith’s contemporary, the connoisseur Horace Walpole, mimicked Smith’s thinking, but spoke of an ‘imaginary” component to the prices being paid for old paintings. Walpole witnessed a surge in interest and cost for paintings, attributing it to renewed interest in the ancient Greek themes of propriety and beauty that accompanied the Enlightenment and the French view, at the time, that painters should represent poetic conceits, preferably in an elevated manner. However one expresses it, the fact is that there is a lot about art prices that are simply not objective. Some, like Walpole, find this troubling, and there is reason to be careful in buying art. At the same time, asking would-be buyers to articulate their preferences – or helping them to do so – and offering them a range of choices, each yielding comparable pleasure in terms of the attributes they tell us they like, but at a range of costs, seems an empowering way to engage buyers, especially those with little experience.    

Christie’s employee passes aboriginal painting by Australian artist Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, ‘Emu Dreaming' (1995),London.

RF- So, looking forward, do you think that scholars and other market experts working on this issue should explore ways of applying the lessons learned from history, as well as understandinging current market trends, in an effort to apply more objective criteria to art valuation. Equity markets in the U.S. have reeled under the effects of globalization and the evaporation of national boundaries, as one country’s problems can now ripple instantly through the entire global financial marketplace. Do you see an issue with modeling an art portfolio as a sector fund, with so many forces affecting perceived value and so many countries and their artistic output now vying for a place on the international art stage?    

NDM- Art markets display some of the unexpectedness we have come to associate with commodity and financial markets. For this, and also other reasons, as I have suggested, investing in art should be undertaken with caution. But what I would rather stress is that beginning and building a collection in art is rewarding in itself. Studies of the return to art as investment tend to ignore the psychic pleasure of seeking, acquiring and living with art, yet art has the distinct advantage over owning stocks or bonds that it supplies a sustained stream of pleasure – or can do so with careful management and reorderings over time of a collection. Even discovering and refining one’s preferences is pleasurable. These things, well managed and with good assistance, add to one’s sense of well-being with greater assurance than many alternatives. The key is to know one’s preferences and articulate them, which is what any creative and skilled consumer wants to do. The bundles of pleasure-yielding attributes appproach sketched earlier in our conversation is a way of doing just that. In this respect it is no different to acquire art than it is to buy a house or a car, to eat well or sustain one’s external environment. When placing a definable value on a work of art is viewed in this way it neither devalues or corrupts it; nor do we have to insist on the aesthetic components as distinct from taking pleasure in selecting and living with art. Pleasure-yielding attributes and skilled choice encompasses those things without isolating them artificially. I have not answered your question but I have repositioned it. We have still a great deal to learn about the behavior of art funds, that is to say art as investment; but we already know a great deal about consumption and can apply that to art. I hope we can talk about this as markets continue to rebound.    

by Richard Friswell, Executive Editor    

Visit these sites to learn more about art valuation, investment programs and statistical approaches to understanding potential future art value:    

The Skates family of services at: www.skatepress.com    

The Mei Moses Art Fine Art Index at www.artasanasset.com    

The artists’ pooled art program at www.artistspensionfund.org

Mint Museum Uptown, Charlotte, N.C. (photo by Jeff Clare)

The Mint Museum welcomed a record-breaking 17,000 visitors to its new facility in uptown Charlotte during its grand opening weekend on 1-3 October, 2010. The debut of the Mint Museum Uptown was accompanied by a 24-Hour Grand Opening celebration, featuring free admission, live entertainment, and art activities for all who attended.

Contemporary art permanent collection galleries of the Mint Museum Uptown (photo by Jeff Clare)

The building also includes a café, the Lewis Family Gallery, painting and ceramics studios, classrooms, a 240-seat auditorium, a Special Events Pavilion with outdoor terrace, and an expanded street-level Museum Shop featuring crafts of the Carolinas and showcasing merchandise that complements both the permanent collection and special exhibitions. Following the opening of the Mint Museum Uptown, the Mint Museum Randolph, located in the historic Eastover neighborhood, will reinstall its galleries dedicated to the art of the ancient Americas, decorative arts, and historic costume, among others.

The Mint Museum and Bank of America have collaborated to present the inaugural exhibition New Visions: Contemporary Masterworks from the Bank of America Collection (1 October 2010 – 17 April 2011), comprising over 60 works from the bank’s art collection. Widely regarded as one of the world’s finest corporate art collections, the Bank of America Collection is noted for its quality, stylistic diversity, historical depth, and attention to regional identity.

Frank Stella, American, 1936- , Damascus Gate II (1968), © Frank Stella / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York

The exhibition contains a broad selection of regionally-diverse practitioners and offers an opportunity to experience significant works by visionary artists of the past decades. The exhibition will feature paintings, sculptures and works on paper by an array of artists, including Milton Avery, Jennifer Bartlett, Roger Brown, John Chamberlain, Janet Fish, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, John Marin, Elizabeth Murray, Louise Nevelson, Jules Olitski, Edward Ruscha, Miriam Schapiro, and Frank Stella.

Beginning with works from 1945, the exhibition highlights the strengths of Bank of America’s postwar collection and reveals a range of creative philosophies, approaches and artistic movements, reaching into the early 1990s. Historically-significant works focusing on intense color and geometry as an organizing principle, such as Frank Stella’s Damascus Gate and Ellsworth Kelly’s Black and White Triangle, reveal the monumental scale and rigorous structures of late 1960s through early 1970s Minimalism. Postminimalist works from the 1980s, such as Elizabeth Murray’s Split and Join and Jennifer Bartlett’s In the Garden, present a return to imagery, while still retaining defined formalist structures.

Elizabeth Murrary, American, 1940- 2007, Split and Join (1980) o/c Bank of America Coll., The Murray-Holman Family Trust, courtesy Pace Gallery

The vibrant and irreverent canvases of Ed Paschke and Roger Brown exhibit the influence of outsider art and Surrealism. This influence was a hallmark of the second generation Chicago Imagists, a regional offshoot of Pop Artists. The influence of popular culture and media fueled diverse works by Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Longo. Paintings by some of California’s most heralded artists—including Edward Ruscha Clock Speed, James Weeks Ocean Park Studio and Wayne Thiebaud Dark Cake—demonstrate a surprising and complex relationship between abstraction and realism. Deborah Butterfield’s cast lead horse sculpture, as well as Lynda Benglis’s biomorphic reliefs and John Chamberlain’s steel assemblage, comprise some of the compelling sculptural works within the show.

New Visions: Contemporary Masterworks from the Bank of America Collection is organized by The Mint Museum, Charlotte, N.C., and provided by Bank of America Art in our Communities™ program. Through this program, Bank of America has converted its collection into a unique community resource from which museums and nonprofit galleries may borrow complete or customized exhibitions. By providing these exhibitions and the support required to host them, the program helps sustain community engagement and generate vital revenue for the nonprofits, creating stability in local communities. From 2008 to 2010, Bank of America will have loaned more than 30 exhibitions to museums internationally.

Ed Ruscha, Clock Speed (1986). Coll. Bank of America

The bank did not set out to collect art, but through numerous acquisitions over the years, art came into their possession. “We were the beneficiaries of a trend that began in the 1950s and 60s and peaked in the 90s, when so many banks ran into difficulty,” said a spokesperson in the bank’s New York City headquarters. Bank of America was the beneficiary of that trend and several years they resolved to use the collection to support communities where it does business and, ‘give something back that would allow us to share what we have in a meaningful way.”

In a statement released by Bank of America, they describe their Art Exhibition Program to include fully-curated exhibitions from their extensive collection of paintings, prints, photographs, sculptures and art objects, which will travel to museums around the country, and exhibitions created in collaboration with curators from major museums.

Museums participating in the program include the Mint Museum of Art (Charlotte), the International Center of Photography (New York), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Philadelphia), the St. Louis Museum of Art, , the Boca Raton Museum of Art and a number of other institutions across the country. These exhibitions will allow audiences to experience extraordinary works of art from the Bank of America Collection, some of which have never been on public view.

Wayne Thiebaud, Dark Cake (1983), woodcut on paper. Coll. Bank of America

“We are pleased to offer this unique program to museums and to share our collection with the widest possible audience,” said Rena M. DeSisto, Bank of America’s Arts & Culture Executive. “From our perspective, sharing these pieces of art with the public through our museum partners is the best possible use of the collection. Not only is there a cultural benefit, but we are bolstering institutions which serve as economic anchors for their respective communities.”

“The scale and scope of this program is unmatched in the art world,” said Millicent Gaudieri, Executive Director, Association of Art Museum Directors. “Bank of America – which is renowned for having one of the most expansive art collections in the world – is addressing a real need among museums. Not only do these exhibits have extraordinary curatorial value, but they help museums by covering most of the major costs associated with the exhibit. This program will be very popular, both for the museums and their visitors.”

In addition to this collaboration, The Mint Museum is also part of Bank of America’s Museums on Us™ program. Through this unique program, anyone with a Bank of America ATM, credit card or check card has the opportunity to gain free admission to more than 120 cultural institutions across the country, including the Mint, during the first Saturday and Sunday of each month.

by Elizabeth Isenhour, Contributing Writer, with additional content by Richard Friswell, Executive Editor

For more information, visit www.mintmuseum.org

Hirst out, Mehretu in

Prior to the Lehman collection sale, Skate’s predicted that if the work, We’ve got Style, (the Vessel Collection – blue/green), right did not sell, it would be a nail in the coffin of Damien Hirst’s art market. Nailed in he is—the failure to find a buyer for Hirst’s work, number one for the auction in terms of estimate range, is a spectacular end to the change in demand for Hirst’s artwork over the last decade. This market, which was estimated at a value in the hundreds of millions of dollars, is now officially illiquid for prices over $1m (and probably over $400-500k) apiece. Skate’s thinks it was a big mistake by Hirst and his dealers/advisers not to support Sotheby’s auction on Saturday and to let the headliner lot go unsold. The auction has brought opposite fortunes to, Untitled 1, the work of Julie Mehretu. (below)

In anticipation of the auction Skate’s wrote:

“Forty-year-old Julie Mehretu is among the youngest represented in the sale, yet her work is priced next to Hirst’s as the most valuable lot of the sale, with a Sotheby’s range of $600-800k. Should it get sold within this range that will constitute an enormous success story for a piece of art created as recently as 2001 and immediately sold to the Lehman collection from the primary market. Going forward, it will also probably make Mehretu the most interesting and value-creating artist to watch.”

Well, Mehretu’s work outperformed and has become the most valuable lot based on auction results. Skate’s welcomes this new queen of the contemporary market and perhaps the hottest star to watch during the coming art-market season. We can already imagine the sale of her multiple works at Frieze and Art Basel Miami.

Read the complete analysis of results from the Lehman collection auction and predictions for coming auctions in our October newsletter: www.skatesartinvestment.com

The Morgan Library & Museum, view of the East Room (Library). photo: Todd Eberle (2006) copyright Todd Eberle

On October 30, 2010, The Morgan Library & Museum’s landmark McKim building will reopen to the public, following the completion of the most extensive restoration of its interior spaces since its construction in 1906. The building, designed by the firm of McKim, Mead and White, was once the private study and library of financier Pierpont Morgan. The Italianate marble villa, designed in the spirit of the High Renaissance, is considered one of New York’s great architectural treasures, and its interiors are regarded as some of the most beautiful in America. The $4.5 million restoration revitalizes the historic center of the Morgan, in many ways completing the institution’s dynamic transformation that began in 2006 with Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano’s successful expansion and renovation of the campus. Fine arts magazine    The project provides enhanced exhibition space for the institution and enables the Morgan to share with the public more treasures from its world-renowned permanent collection. The inaugural installation demonstrates the extraordinary quality and scope of Pierpont Morgan’s interests as a collector and cultural steward. Nearly 300 objects dating from 3500 BC to the twentieth century will be displayed throughout the building’s majestic rooms in a series of rotating exhibitions. Previously, only about thirty objects were regularly on view in the McKim.   

The new Renzo Piano expansion of the Morgan. Photography by Michel Denance

The Morgan will celebrate the restoration project with a series of special activities, culminating with the October 30, 2010, public opening. Beginning with a media preview on October 21, the week-long festivities will include a special gala for Morgan patrons and a members’ open house. The public opening will include performances by student musicians from the Mannes College, The New School of Music, and the New-Trad Octet, as well as a special lecture by Morgan director William M. Griswold and docent-led tours of the McKim building throughout the day. Special screenings of the film, All the Beautiful Things in the World: An Introduction to the Morgan, also will be presented that day.   

“The reopening of the McKim building is a special moment in the history of the institution,” said Morgan Director William M. Griswold, who is guiding the first major capital project since he assumed his position in 2008. “The building is the heart and soul of The Morgan Library & Museum. Not only does it embody the taste and vision of the museum’s founder and patron, Pierpont Morgan, but over the years its beautiful rooms have become synonymous with all that makes the Morgan special. No visit to the museum is complete without a tour of the McKim building, and now, with this ambitious project and the installation of some of the Morgan’s outstanding treasures, that experience will be greatly enhanced.”   

Room-by-Room Summary   

The restoration project encompasses all of the McKim’s rooms and exhibition spaces. Key components include new lighting throughout the building to better illuminate its extraordinary murals and decor, the opening of the North Room to visitors for the first time, installation of new exhibition cases to house rotating displays of masterpieces from the Morgan’s collections, restoration of period furniture and fixtures, and cleaning of the walls and applied ornamentation.   

Library (East Room)   

Morgan's East Room Library. Photo by Graham Haber (2010)

  Pierpont Morgan’s stunning library, also known as the East Room, is defined by its majestic thirty-foot walls, lined floor to ceiling with triple tiers of bookcases made of inlaid Circassian walnut and featuring volumes of European literature from the sixteenth through twentieth centuries. The library now will be equipped with a new state-of-the-art, yet subtle lighting system; a newly installed late-nineteenth-century Persian rug of the type originally in the room; and newly designed display cases that will be used to exhibit some of the Morgan’s most valued objects.   

The revamped lighting will allow visitors to fully appreciate the splendor of the lunettes and spandrels of the library’s decorative ceiling, the work of noted muralist Henry Siddons Mowbray (1858–1928), which features cultural luminaries of the past such as Socrates, Galileo, Botticelli, and Michelangelo, as well as signs of the zodiac. The improved illumination also will significantly enhance the focal point of the room— the grand fireplace and sixteenth-century tapestry depicting the triumph of Avarice, from a series depicting the Seven Deadly Sins.   

The inlaid walnut bookshelves that contain the Morgan’s collection of rare books will be enhanced with nonreflective Plexiglas, allowing visitors to identify individual titles and to appreciate the beauty of the exquisite bindings more fully.   

An original pendant chandelier, preserved since its removal about seventy years ago and designed by twentieth-century New York designer Edward F. Caldwell, will be restored and rehung at the library’s entrance. Seating also will be installed to enable visitors to spend more time contemplating this extraordinary room.   

Prior to the restoration, only a handful of objects were regularly on view in the library. Highlights of the approximately one hundred rotating works that will be on display each year in this room include examples of some of the Morgan’s finest literary and historical manuscripts, medieval and Renaissance illuminated texts, music manuscripts, and printed books and bindings. Visitors will encounter a letter from fifteen-year-old Queen Elizabeth I purchased by Pierpont Morgan in 1900; the manuscript for Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet (1833) with a torturous mass of revisions, corrections, and additions demonstrating the writer’s complex creative process; illustrated notes by Alexander Calder regarding the installation of his “stabiles” from 1941; the Reims Gospel Book, the Morgan’s finest Carolingian manuscript, written in gold at the Abbey of St. Remi (ca. 860); the manuscript of Mozart’s famed “Haffner” Symphony No. 35 (1732); a newly discovered manuscript for Robert Schumann’s “Des Knaben Berglied” (1849) acquired by the Morgan in 2009 and displayed for the first time; one of the earliest editions of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1483); the first edition of Lewis Caroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1872) with proofs of Tenniel’s illustrations; Mary Shelley’s annotated copy of her masterpiece Frankenstein (1818); and one of the Morgan’s three original Gutenberg Bibles (ca. 1455), the first book printed with moveable type.   

Study (West Room)   

 The Renaissance-inspired furnishings of the Study, or West Room, and the paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts displayed, reveal the breadth of Morgan’s interests and activity as a collector, and reflect his reputation as a “modern day Medici.” The room is defined by its sixteenth-century Florentine coffered wooden ceiling, red silk damask wall coverings patterned after the wall in the Roman palace of famed Renaissance banker Agostino Chigi, and fifteenth- to seventeenth-century stained glass fragments embedded into the windows.   

The Study will be enriched by a more substantive display of works from the collection that surrounded Pierpont Morgan in the early 1900s, when he used the room for personal business, as well as with objects that have been acquired since. More than double the number of objects will be on view, including works never shown before, such as the 1530 Verrazano globe, one of the earliest known dated globes, and a bronze St. John the Baptist after Michelozzo. Other works include paintings by Hans Memling, Francesco Francia, Perugino, and Jacopo Tintoretto, among others.   

The steel-lined vault in the southeast corner of the room, equipped with a bank vault door and combination lock, is where Pierpont Morgan housed his most valued acquisitions, particularly his collection of more than 600 medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. The vault remained in use until 2003, housing by then the more than 1,300 medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in the institution’s collection. As part of the McKim restoration project, another modification to the Study makes the vault more accessible to visitors. The curtain currently shrouding the vault’s entrance will be removed, new lighting fixtures will be installed, and the vault shelves will be filled with sumptuous leather boxes that housed the Morgan’s manuscripts and rare books. Several small bronze objects and tomes in which many of Pierpont Morgan’s collections were published also will be on display. The vault’s original runner was conserved and will be installed in its original location.   

Additional works of sculpture such as such as the Bust of the Christ Child by Antonio Rossellino and Saint John the Baptist by Giovanni Francesco Rustici will be exhibited on the low bookshelves lining the perimeter of the room, and the lush, velvet-covered furnishings will be reupholstered to evoke the atmosphere of the study as it was in Pierpont Morgan’s day.   

North Room   

The North Room, former office of Morgan's first director, Belle da Costa Greene

 The North Room, the intimate office of the Morgan’s first director, Belle da Costa Greene, will open to the public for the first time, and will be transformed to feature the earliest works in the Morgan’s collection, including objects from the Ancient Near East, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, as well as artifacts from the early medieval period. More than 200 objects will be on permanent view in this new exhibition space. The two-tiered room, lined with walnut bookshelves, features a ceiling of Renaissance-inspired paintings and a bronze bust of Giovanni Boccaccio on the mantle of the fireplace.   

Bookshelves along the perimeter of the room will be converted to exquisitely lit cases to display these items, notably a selection of Ancient Near Eastern cylinder seals collected by Pierpont Morgan. Dating from around 3500 BC, these miniature engraved stones were in use for about 3,000 years in the region referred to as Mesopotamia. These seals were the earliest known objects to use pictorial symbols to communicate ideas. Also on view is a selection of clay tablets, including a seventeenth-century BC fragment inscribed with the Babylonian flood epic predating the story of Noah’s Ark in the Old Testament.   

The room will accommodate freestanding cases for Near Eastern as well as ancient Greek and Roman objects, including a pair of intricately decorated first-century Roman silver cups and a rare thirteenth-century BC stone tablet featuring cuneiform inscriptions.   

The installation also will include jeweled and metalwork objects such as buckles, brooches, and other personal ornaments dating from the second to the tenth centuries, from the collection of Morgan trustee Eugene V. Thaw and his wife, Clare, as well as an eleventh-century jeweled book binding. The Migration-era objects from the Thaw collection document the medieval period in Europe.   

The original chandeliers, removed two generations ago, will be refinished and reinstalled, allowing for optimal appreciation of the recently cleaned ceiling and upper-tier bookcases. In addition, two Egyptian basalt votive figures will flank the room’s fireplace on new pedestals.   

Rotunda   

The 1906 Rotunda, dramatic entrance to the original McKim building

  The Rotunda, originally entered through the grand doors facing 36th Street, is the dramatic center of the McKim building. Its intricate and elaborately decorated ceiling, also painted by Mowbray, refers thematically to the great treasures contained within this remarkable structure, depicting figures from classical antiquity and the great literary epochs of the past, including Homer, Dante, and Petrarch. The splendor of color and texture is supplied by variegated marble surfaces and columns, mosaic panels and columns of lapis lazuli.   

The marble surfaces and mosaic panels that are signature features of the McKim Rotunda have been cleaned and restored to their original grandeur for the first time in a century. New lighting will simulate the natural light that originally came through the oculus and will enhance the richly illustrated apse, ceiling, and lunettes.   

Prior to the restoration, the Rotunda was not used as an exhibition space. Now, new display cases will be installed, housing the first substantive display of the Morgan’s outstanding collection of Americana, including such great works as autograph letters by Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, the Morgan’s life mask of George Washington, copies of the first Bible printed in America, and the Declaration of Independence.   

Edited by Richard Friswell, ARTES Executive Editor   

Visit the Morgan Library web site to learn more about McKim Re-opening Day events on Saturday, October 30, 2010 at www.themorgan.org  or call 212.685.0008   

                                                                                                   About the Restoration Project Team   

Roy Lichtenstein, Woman in Bath (1963). The Black-and-White Drawings (1961–68) On view at the Morgan from Sept. 24, 2010–Jan. 2, 2011

 Jennifer Tonkovich, curator of Drawings and Prints at The Morgan Library & Museum, is coordinating the reinstallation of collection objects in the McKim building; Exhibition design: Stephen Saitas, Stephen Saitas Designs; Lighting design: Richard Renfro, Renfro Design Group, Inc.; Architect of record: Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners LLP   

The Morgan Library & Museum   

The Morgan Library & Museum began as the private library of financier Pierpont Morgan, one of the preeminent collectors and cultural benefactors in the United States. Today, more than a century after its founding in 1906, the Morgan serves as a museum, independent research library, musical venue, architectural landmark, and historic site. In 2006, the Morgan completed the largest expansion and renovation in its history, designed by architect Renzo Piano. This project, in tandem with the 2010 restoration of the Morgan’s historic McKim building, is giving the public unprecedented access to the Morgan’s world-renowned collection, which encompasses manuscripts, books, drawings and artwork ranging from Rembrandt to Picasso, Mozart to Bob Dylan, Dickens to Hemingway, and Gutenberg Bibles to The Story of Babar. A superb repository of the history, art and literature of Western civilization from 4000 BC to the twenty-first century, the Morgan today occupies a unique position in the cultural life of New York City and is one of its greatest treasures.

I

“Who still has the money to spend on fine art and collectables today and are these buyers finding bargains in the current marketplace,” I asked?

“Money is pooled at the top,” said Mr. Genocchio, “and the luxury sector is doing very well. Of course, the art market is a very small component of the total luxury market, but it is still reflective of a general trend. You can see that Tiffanys recently reported good earnings, while for the same period, Wal-Mart did not. This is an indication that the people with money are still spending, but they have pulled back a bit and buying behavior is more conservative.” Fine Arts Magazine

“But, the big auction houses are reporting good earnings as well, with some record prices for certain pieces.”

Alberto Giacometti ,''L'homme qui marche, I'' (1961)

“If you’re referring to Giacometti’s , L’homme qui marche, I, which sold recently for $104.3 million and Picasso’s, Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto (below), in June for $51.6 million, those were highly-publicized anomalies that, if you’ll recall, happened to coincide with spikes in global equity markets. People want to feel bullish after a long period of sell-offs in the markets. Those particular sales and others, to a lesser degree, respond to their own set of logical parameters. They may be purely anecdotal, when you consider the quality and rarity of those particular works—they would be considered a good asset class by anyone’s standard, but particularly if you have the money to spend.

“How are most other auction houses doing, if the bigger operations are struggling?”

“Other auction houses in the U.S., Europe and China are working hard to ‘make the sale’. The appetite for risk among collectors, particularly in the mid-priced market, has cooled. Those who can afford to have moved away from the contemporary category and into blue chips, like the Old Masters and early 20th century notables. In this way, the art market reflects broader market trends. I have noticed, for example, that Brazilians are buying now, Indians are buying, the Russian appetite for risk has diminished after they helped drive the market for a while. But, in spite of this, and speaking generally, the art market is reflecting broader market trends and discretionary spending is down. Sites like Art Info.com, that maintain daily records on global sales, are still showing very mixed results from most auctions.”

“If I’m not mistaken,” changing focus to another aspect of the secondary art market,” there is an abundance of art fairs around the world and the numbers of regional events just seem to keep growing. How do they all stay alive?”

Pablo Picasso, "Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto" (1903)

Apart from established events like Art Basel in certain key cities and a range of New York shows like the Armory show, most art fairs are in locations with a soft gallery structure. These are more spectacles, than a reflection of an established art market. They draw in a group from a particular geographic region for a short-term event that offers art for sale for a few days; then they pack up and leave. It is difficult to judge the state of the art-buying scene based on these retail events. They are fleeting and therefore, not reliable indicators.”

Shifting gears again, I move the focus to Mr. Genocchio’s address to the audience on October 5th. “I believe you are planning to talk about the impact of new media on the traditional art publishing world? What can you tell me about how things have changed in recent years?”

“I am currently executive editor for three Web sites and two magazines. I have seen a sea change in the way information is disseminated in recent years. There are generational and attitudinal issues to consider. By that, I mean we in the publishing business have to consider how people want to get their news. Weekly periodicals are struggling, but daily is still a key word when we consider how people choose to consume information. The weekly magazine is all but dead.”

“I can remember when I worked in my native Australia, in the ‘70s, Time Magazine was the Internet of its day. A local publisher would buy 30% of Time’s content from the parent company, plug in 70% regional news and advertising and sell a recognized brand in the marketplace. Under that arrangement, you enjoyed a geographical monopoly. The Internet explodes all of that!”

“Later, in the ‘90s, I went to work for Rupert Murdoch. I watched as he invested newspaper’s golden goose, otherwise known as classified advertising revenues, into high-tech infrastructure: dedicated satellites, TV networks and the like. He saw the future…and it was not made of paper! The issue that many publications are now confronting is, ‘adapt or die’. With so much invested in traditional forms of information management and delivery, many print media publications would rather go out of business than change to a new delivery method. A lot of that resistance has to do with revenue generation and how to monetize a Web-based system of information management. That is the challenge we all face and those who can do it successfully will be the ones who survive in the future.”

Lastly, I directed a question to Mr. Genocchio that had originally topped my list: “What advice do you have for today’s collector who may be trying to decide to jump into or re-enter the art market, but believes that it feels a bit like challenging the spring rapids on the Colorado River in a rubber raft?”

“I address this very issue in the most recent issue of Art + Auction, because I am asked about this all the time. Essentially, the issues haven’t changed. First, be aware of every buying opportunity. Don’t just buy at auction or through the same dealer. Scout the galleries and become familiar with emerging artists in your area. Then, educate yourself regarding the art market and the work of those artists who appeal to you. Read everything you can get your hands on and don’t be afraid to ask questions.”

“Third, don’t buy anything you don’t want to wake up to in the morning and look at every day. It has been said, ‘buy what you love’, and that still holds true. Of all the reasons to acquire art, the most important and time-tested is the enjoyment of looking at it. Over time, a given piece may increase in price, but if you only buy for investment purposes, you’ll probably end up with an artwork you really don’t like—and one that’s worth even less than you paid.”

“Next, work with a trusted expert who can guide you through the morass of unproductive and over-priced directions that you may choose to pursue. Good advice may cost you in the short-run, but the value of that guidance helps to take the emotion out of purchasing art and results in a dispassionate, more informed series of decisions, as your collection grows. And last, consider the work itself: what I call the ‘registers of value’. This includes the record of sales for comparable works by the artist, condition, subject matter and provenance. You can buy what you like, but remember that what you like may turn into a financial asset. It pays to buy smart.”

by Richard Friswell, Executive Editor

Editor’s note: Register to hear Benjamin Genocchio speak at New York City’s Art of Leadership lecture series on October 5, 2010 or to be placed on the list for future events at: www.artleadership.com