And some folks don’t like it.

Rufino Tamayo’s “Watermelon Slices” is being sold by New York’s Museum of Modern Art to raise money for its acquisition fund. It will be auctioned on Nov. 16 in Sotheby’s Latin American art fall sale.

Via Yahoo!News and Reuters.

When the contract says something different than what is advertised.

Remember the big fiasco concerning Brandeis University’s possible fire sale of the Rose Art Museum’s collection? Well, the Chronicle of Higher Education has published the following news.

Brandeis University announced on Thursday that it would not sell any part of its prized collection of modern art at its Rose Art Museum, ending a long-simmering dispute that had cast a negative light on the Massachusetts institution.

However, Donn Zaretsky takes issue with this statement as well as headlines from the Boston Globe, LA Times, and The Art Newspaper.

That isn’t quite right.  What the settlement agreement says (you can read it here; see the last sentence of paragraph 1) is that Brandeis “has no aim, plan, design, strategy or intention to sell any artwork.” There’s a big difference between saying that and saying they promise not to sell any artwork.

Glad someone’s doing some content checking.

As luck would have it (or call me maladjusted), I was reading a bit on slippery slopes yesterday, specifically Eugene Volokh’s “The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope,” and lo and behold this morning I wake to Mud coffee and Donn Zaretsky’s take on the latest anti-deaccessioning war-cry.

In a nutshell, Zaretsky argues that the slippery slope catastrophe can be avoided by simply “plow[ing] the roads now and then.” I say we use Duchamp’s In Advance of the Broken Arm.

Artwork from Hungary’s communist era is to be auctioned off to raise funds for those affected by October’s toxic sludge spillage. The “useless” art has been held in basements and storage rooms of Hungarian government buildings since 1990. All the proceeds from the auction will be donated to the Catholic charity Caritas.

Via The BBC.

Leading international museum directors have restated their opposition to the financially motivated sale of works of art from public collections when the proceeds are used for “anything other than acquisitions or the direct care of the collection”.

Via The Art Newspaper.

Marlon Bishop, of WNYC, interviewed me yesterday for a story on deaccessioning. The radio version came out yesterday, but you can read Bishop’s article, Art Deaccessioning: Right or Wrong?, on WNYC’s website, as well as hear a few soundbites from me; Kaywin Feldman, president of the Association of Art Museum Directors and director of the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts; and anti-deaccessionist, Lee Rosenbaum.

I’m travelling at the moment for a talk on artist consignment agreements and fiscal sponsorships, but will elaborate more on deaccessioning here and on my other blog, The Deaccessioning Blog, soon. What do you think? Deaccession or not? Is there a middle ground?

Erin Donnelly has just informed me that Art21 has just launched what appears to be a timely and exciting program dealing with ethics and law. The Flash Point program, The Ethics of Art, will explore the issue of ethics in art from a variety of perspectives.

Throughout this topic, we’ll feature artists who make this ethical debate a focus in their work, from artists who question the role of the institution, such as Hans Haacke or Marcel Broodthaers, to artists like Alfredo Jaar, who examines the disparity between an oil-rich government and a poverty-stricken populace in his work Muxima.

Ethical decisions also factor into the artistic process. Does a photographer who sells a portrait owe anything, financially or psychologically, to the work’s subject? What kind of ownership does an artist have over reproduced images of his or her work? We’ll also look at the discussions taking place around the use of animals in art[.] Ethical issues can even come into play after an artist’s death, especially in the handling the artist’s estate and the management of his or her legacy.

Controversies and arguments abound as ethical decisions, or the lack thereof, play a role in institutional practice. With the ever-shrinking gap between commerce and culture, the prioritization of good business over public service creates an increasingly blurry set of ethical guidelines. Collector-based exhibitions, conflicts of interest, deaccessioning practices…do museums have a responsibility to their public? And if so, is this a part of institutional culture and is it being taught in today’s museum studies programs?

Here are some topics they’ll cover:

Another relevant subtopic would analyze the distinction between ethics and law, or the “should” and the “can,” and perhaps what the artist’s role is in defining and blurring these two discourses.

Judith Dobrzynski, a former reporter and editor at the NY Times, wrote yesterday on a very interesting alternative to the deaccessioning fight. In brief, she argues for an “impartial arbitrator,” which would hear a museum’s argument and need for deaccessioning art to pay the bills.

Maybe it’s best to amend the unwritten sales ban, but not end it. What if a museum had to argue its case for de-accessioning art before an impartial arbitrator? This neutral party would need to be schooled in art, art law and nonprofit regulations. [bold mine]

If done properly, this is actually the best solution put on the table so far, and to my delight (and self-serving position) something not too far from what I have argued on my Deaccessioning Blog.

THE squeeze is on. Museums everywhere are having trouble making ends meet, what with the overblown expansions they’ve made, the decline in investment income and the steep drop-off in contributions from foundations and individuals. Many have cut staff, frozen pay, trimmed exhibition schedules and slowed or stopped acquisitions. For some, that may not be enough: the American Folk Art Museum, to cite one example, recently admitted that it isn’t making debt payments.

Dobrzynski seems to be reigniting, in an academic and open town-hall-meeting of sorts, the deaccessioning debate started in early 2009 over the Rose Art Museum, and being the first in 2010 to realize that the museum economic disasters are intensifying and not-at-all decreasing. She sites others on her corner with similar thoughts.

What’s next? In some corners, there’s fear that museum officials will do what is absolutely forbidden by art-world rules: raise operating cash with a sale of artwork. Already some respected figures — David Gordon, former head of the Milwaukee Art Museum, and Richard Armstrong, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, for example — are saying that the rule against selling art for any purpose other than buying more art is wrong.

What do you think? Deaccessioning Arbitration and Regulation Panel (DARP)? That’s my vote! Good start for 2010. Judith’s article in its entirety here.

UPDATE: January 4, 2009

Judith has a few more thoughts on her op-ed on her blog, and here are my thoughts regarding lawyers as arbitrators.

Copyright, copyright, copyright. It’s all copyright. Writing, sculpture, photographic images, paintings, a postage stamp. The Little Mermaid, web aggregators, J.D. Salinger, Mannie Garcia, Shepard Fairey, the Associated Press, Patrick Cariou, Richard Prince, Frank Gaylord, the United States Post Office: all involved in a copyright dispute of some sort. To say that heightened awareness of copyright issues is due in large part to the internet is an understatement. Realistically speaking, original creators are realizing the financial potential of their creations and, unlike before, the nice-guy attitude is relinquished, and rightly so. It is time that a nation founded on property principles revisits the dilapidated state of its property rights, primarily those of intellectual property. It is time that congress and courts restore to property owners their constitutional right to exploit or dispose of their property as they see fit.

This is not to say that all uses or transformations of an original artist’s work should be criminalized or made unlawful, but rather that the courts should look with utmost caution and skepticism at the secondary production and rigorously question the ease with which it was produced. It has become much too facile for artists to wake to a cup of coffee and sit at their desktops, click on Google Images and steal away. If the argument is that the internet has in fact heightened the mass dissemination of images, sounds, and texts, then it logically follows that finding the original author and creator is just as simple. Most websites have contact information for their creators and editors. Why can’t secondary users contact the original creators and ask for permission, license or, simply put, ask for an outright sale of the work?

And why the selective reasoning by artists on the applicability of fair use: the continued insistence that it’s ok to steal from someone else yet no one else better steal from me? Does this self-entitlement to anyone’s cultural goods hinge on the classist and elitist distinction made between fine artist and craftsman, between contemporary artist and technician? Isn’t this the same distinction that many of the artists siding with Shepard Fairey and the U.S. Post office helped to deconstruct: the blurring of craft and high-art? What makes Frank Gaylord (the sculptor and copyright owner of the Korean War Veteran’s Memorial) and Mannie Garcia (the photographer who shot the Obama image for the AP) any less of an artist? Should a “strict scrutiny” style structure be applied to “fair use,” favoring original authors and creators, regardless of their standing on the artist/craftsman scale? It’s time that U.S. courts put an end to the belief by many that it’s ok to make a bountiful living off the work of someone else.

How Will I Laugh Tomorrow?

While museums continue to suffer closings, layoffs and cutbacks, the College Art Association initiates an anti-deaccessioning petition. This position is absurd at best and irresponsible at worst. Donors will continue to gift artworks to museums and public art institutions regardless of deaccessioning. Barring a flop by Obama and the states on tax-deductible donations, the incentives (financial and tax-wise) are and will remain highly lucrative for and beneficial to donors. The financial calamity we have experienced should tell us that if the general “public” is skeptical of funding a nation-wide healthy system, they are most certainly against any further funding of the arts through higher taxes. There are more than enough ethical and legal arguments for allowing museums and public art institutions to deaccession artworks for general and operating support. Among these of course is a constitutional right of a property owner to exploit and dispose of her property as she sees fit. Barring any unbreakable donor intent clauses or other legal restrictions, if the gifted artwork is the sole property of a museum, it stands to reason that it is the museum, as property owner, that has sole discretion of the artwork’s use. The continued idealization of art and of artworks as existing outside a capitalist profit-driven structure and the perverse negation of its commercial status will only further the demise of its production and its reception.