Legal Commentary

In financial stress from the pandemic, "Museums Sell Picasso and Warhol, Embrace Diversity to Survive."

Museums are not only selling works long off the market but acquiring pieces by female, Black and Latino artists, and -- they hope -- gaining new visitors who will see themselves reflected in the hushed halls.... 

This week at Christie?s, Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, sold its sole Jackson Pollock painting for $13 million and Springfield Museums in Massachusetts offloaded a Picasso for $4.4 million.... 

?Museums have amazing power,? [said Adam Levine, the new leader of the Toledo Museum of Art] ?When we put something on the wall, it becomes unimpeachably great.? It also becomes unimpeachably valuable, and museums are under pressure to give power and value to those who?ve been underrepresented. Levine?s first acquisition was Black artist Bisa Butler?s large-scale quilted portrait of Frederick Douglass, whose title alludes to his speech to abolish slavery.

Oddly, Bloomberg fails to tell us the title, but let it be known that it refers to his "speech to abolish slavery." (By the way,  "speech to abolish slavery" is also bad writing.) I looked it up. It's called "The Storm, the Whirlwind, and the Earthquake" and it was made just this year. But once it's on a wall in the Toledo Museum of Art it's "unimpeachably great," so what an admirable acquisition by the museum!

Indeed, every acquisition of the museum is "unimpeachably great," at least in the amazing power of the mind of Adam Levine.

In Baltimore, the city?s encyclopedic museum is selling three signature works -- by Clyfford Still, Brice Marden and Warhol -- to raise $65 million.

These are all white men made unimpeachably great by the hanging of their painted rectangles on the walls of museums. Take them off the wall... and then what?! Dump them on the market ? while all the other erstwhile great junk floods the market ? and use the proceeds not to keep museum workers on the payroll ? these people are losing their jobs like mad ? but to heed the call of an "imperative" wafting through through the cultural air:

A key Abstract Expressionist who spent the final decades of his life on a Maryland farm, Still gave his ?157-G? painting to Baltimore as a gift. It?s estimated to sell for $12 million to $18 million and some funds are to be used to buy works by women and people of color. ?The imperative to act and address decades of inaction around equality in the museum is enormously important,? said Christopher Bedford, museum director. He says the emphasis on diversity will ?ensure that the story we are narrating is the full and true story.?

Yes, ensure, please, ensure. Here, Andy, quick, paint this: 

Full post as published by Althouse on October 10, 2020 (boomark / email).