Shocking Exhibition

"The Business of Art" by András Szánto, in The American Prospect (Feb. 28, 2000), Five Broad St., Boston, Mass. 02109.

The controversy last fall over the Sensation exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art left many besides New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani aghast. More disturbing to some than the elephant-dung Virgin Mary and other dubious works on display were the museum’s cozy financial relations with art patrons and dealers. The collection’s owner, Charles Saatchi, for instance, whose works were likely to fetch higher prices thanks to the prestige-enhancing exhibition, paid $160,000 of the museum’s costs. Did commerce affect curatorial judgment in Brooklyn? Of course it did—as it does at most museums of contemporary art, argues Szánto, associate director of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University.

"The art world isn’t an unscrupulous racket," he says. "But only the most naïve could assume that money and influence do not play a role in deciding what kind of art gets to be exhibited in museums." Of course "artworks placed in exhibitions and published in catalogues increase in monetary value"; of course "corporate sponsors are allowed to wine and dine clients in museums"; of course "lenders to exhibitions are also asked to write checks." The sorts of deals made in Brooklyn are pretty much SOP these days, says Szánto. "How could they not be? Over the past several decades, the art world has been hurled at the mercy of market forces."

Between 1982 and 1998, according to a recent Alliance for the Arts report, funding from all governmental sources for New York arts organizations dropped from 28.9 percent of their income to 11.1 percent, with federal funding alone plummeting by 88 percent, to a negligible 1.2 percent. "Corporate funding, which comes with more and more strings attached," Szánto says, "is also on the wane," down to 3.9 percent. "Foundation support has been easier to come by in these flush times, but it is a hit-or-miss affair." As for gift shop sales and other profit-making enterprises, no museum makes more than 10 percent of revenues that way. All this leaves private donors to take up the slack. Meanwhile, Szánto notes, art prices have skyrocketed. Works by Damien Hirst, whose sliced barnyard animals appeared in Sensation, now fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars.

More Sensation-type deals are inevitable, says Szánto. The best way for museums to keep from becoming "galleries in disguise, mere means to augment the value of private collections," he believes, is to give up any "anachronistic belief in the purity of the [museum] project," openly acknowledge the "business side" of their operations, as newspapers and other publishing companies do, and develop ethical guidelines to keep it from becoming dominant.