Museum Gives Out Fake Drugs In Art Exhibit Experiment

"The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Taipei assured the public Tuesday that all of its exhibitions follow law and safety regulations in the wake of a controversial art show that was staged April 3. The show involved a local ..." [Read Full Article]

Published By: Focus Taiwan News Channel
On: 05/04/11
Website: http://focustaiwan.tw/

 

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International Museum Directors: Museums Selling Art For Cash Is Wrong

International move to curb disposals

UK position weakened, leading to calls for greater safeguards against rash sales

 

LONDON. 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”. The call comes at a time in the UK when the pressure to sell works is increasing and concerns are rising at the lack of obstacles to ill-conceived sales.

Manuel Borja-Villel, the director of the Reina Sofía museum, Madrid, speaking as president of the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (Cimam)—whose board includes Neal Benezra, the director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sheena Wagstaff, chief curator, Tate Modern, and Kaspar König, the director, Ludwig Museum, Cologne—said Cimam was concerned by cases when money from sales was diverted to “things that had little do with collections, such as expansions”.

Cimam, which is a committee of the prestigious International Council of Museums, said museums risk suspension if they break this principle.

“It is important to restate that a public collection is different from a private collection,” said Borja-Villel. “The public collection has an element of memory—we must respect what colleagues have collected before us.” He added decisions need to be made by directors, “not by politicians or just managers”.

This follows the hardening of the US Association of Art Museum Directors’ (AAMD) opposition to deaccessioning to raise funds for operating expenses and expansion projects. In June, Kaywin Feldman, director of the AAMD, said: “No exceptions will be made.”

Concern is rising in the UK at the lack of safeguards to rash, financially motivated sales from regional collections at a time when pressure on local authority finances will increase following the coalition government’s austerity drive.

Stephen Deuchar, the director of the Art Fund, said: “We are implacably opposed to councillors pointing to a Picasso and seeing a short-term solution to a funding crisis. Deaccessioning is not a sin but it has to be very carefully undertaken.”

Current safeguards are voluntary and depend largely on moral persuasion. The UK Museums Association (MA) has relaxed its ethical stance from a hard-line presumption against disposal to one that accepts that works of art might be sacrificed for the greater good of a collection. “The basic principle of museums in exceptional circumstances liquidating their collections is a principle that we have embraced since 2007,” said Maurice Davies, the MA’s head of policy, “and the world hasn’t come to an end.”

The MA did not protest when this year the Royal Cornwall Museum sold two paintings including Ernest Normand’s Bondage, 1895, which had been in the collection for 90 years and was considered important enough for Tate Britain to borrow for its reopening in 2001. The painting failed to meet its reserve at Christie’s in June and was then sold privately for just over £1m to build an endowment.

When in 2009 councillors in Southampton proposed selling a painting by Alfred Munnings and one of two sculptures by Rodin to help fund a maritime museum, it caused disquiet. “The MA thought the basic idea was OK,” said Davies.

One proposal for greater regulation is to create an expert panel that would review proposed deaccessions, an idea explored in detail by Edward Manisty and Julian Smith in the journal Art Antiquity and Law. Such a panel would act along the lines of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art (see box below).

Minister for culture Ed Vaizey, who is due to deliver a keynote speech at a seminar at the National Gallery in London next May to discuss deaccessioning, said: “It is primarily for museum professionals to navigate through these complex issues, but Government has an interest in the wider public policy context.”

So is an expert panel needed? Maurice Davies thinks not: “The last thing we want is another committee. And it would require legislation.” Diane Lees, the director general of the Imperial War Museum, who is also due to speak is also doubtful. “Arbitration is more helpful than a big mechanism for exceptional examples.”

Bendor Grosvenor, another planned speaker at the seminar, who is a director of Philip Mould and a former advisor to the Conservative Party on museums, supports the idea: “Government would be well placed to look at setting up an expert panel,” he said, adding: “If you had a panel it could help regional museums make decisions—and to get best value for sales.”

Fred Hohler, who set up the Public Catalogue Foundation to document the nation’s collection of paintings, said: “These collections are assets and they could be economic assets [to cities] if they were enhanced.” He also warned: “It’s not just the Titians, Veroneses and Botticellis, it is the ‘unimportant’ paintings [that should be protected] that are going to become increasingly important as a visual record of the world before photography—even more so when you add watercolours and drawings.”

This article is from: http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/International+move+to+curb+disposals/21815

LA County Museum Pushes The Pause Button On New Construction

Los Angeles County Museum of Art officials halt further construction until more donations are secured

A mixed review on the institution's finances by Moody's Investors Service prompts the action. An additional $100 million is sought.

After nearly five years of constant construction and much more still to go, leaders of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have resolved not to continue until they have socked away an additional $100 million in donations on top of the $320 million in cash and pledges given so far.

A mixed review of LACMA's recession-buffeted finances issued Wednesday by Moody's Investors Service lays out the reasons why the museum that opened the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and the BP Grand Entrance in 2008 and the Resnick Exhibition Pavilion in September is stopping for a refueling before pushing ahead.

LACMA officials said early in 2009 that the poor economy had forced them to delay the next scheduled project, carving offices and more gallery space out of LACMA West, a former May Co. department store at Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. But no fundraising threshold had been publicly attached to its resumption until now. (The LACMA West renovation would complete the second part of a three-phase, $450-million construction agenda. The third phase involves unspecified changes to aging buildings on the east end of the campus.)

Although Moody's did not downgrade the previous A2 rating on $383 million in construction bonds LACMA has issued to pay for its "Transformation" campaign, it forecasts rough going ahead, leading to a drop in the rating's outlook from "stable" to "negative."

Although A2 denotes an "upper-medium grade" investment that's a "good credit risk," Moody's pointed to some of the fine print in LACMA's complex bond transactions in explaining why the outlook, defined as "an opinion regarding the likely direction of an issuer's rating over the medium term," has turned negative.

To make its tax-free bonds more attractive to investors, LACMA purchased a guarantee called a letter of credit from a consortium of banks. The banks promised to pay off the bondholders should the museum default; in turn, LACMA agreed to maintain a certain degree of financial liquidity to reassure its bankers that no default would occur. But construction spending has eaten away at the museum's liquid assets, and the bad economy has stalled the fundraising needed to replenish them.

LACMA is $130 million short of its campaign's overall goal and $63 million shy of what's needed to back up its bonds, which don't start maturing until 2030 but carry projected interest costs of more than $10 million a year.

The measure of liquidity LACMA has committed to is called an Unrestricted Net Assets Ratio. A ratio of 0.95 or more is peachy; under 0.75 means disaster — a default. Since 2008-09, when LACMA's investment portfolio plunged 23.4% in the global meltdown (it regained 12.6% in 2009-10), the ratio has been in a gray area much of the time. It dipped as low as 0.88 on June 30, 2010, when liquid assets totaled $118.6 million. Now it stands at 0.91, according to Ann Rowland, LACMA's chief financial officer. Each ratio point equals $3 million to $4 million, Rowland said, meaning that the museum has stayed at least about $40 million clear of defaulting.

There have been some mild consequences: When the ratio, which is calculated each June 30 and Dec. 31, falls under 0.95, the museum has to transfer $12.5 million into a kind of escrow account to reassure the banks, although LACMA still gets to control how the money is invested. But a drop below 0.85, Moody's said, would pose "a significant credit concern" because it could trigger provisions in which LACMA wouldn't be able to spend any of its unrestricted funds — those not legally reserved for a donor-specified use — without clearance from its banks.

Rowland said Wednesday that even when its ratio fell to 0.88, LACMA had a cushion of about $12 million to avoid triggering that "significant credit concern." Everything should be OK going forward, she said, because for the first time in years the museum won't be spending large sums on architects and contractors, and presumably it won't be seeing its investments shrinking rapidly amid another round of global market mayhem.

But Rowland and Mark Mitchell, the museum's budget and investment officer, said it remains important for LACMA to make renewed progress on the capital campaign, which has netted just $9 million since mid-2008.

LACMA will still have $50 million in unspent bond proceeds when the restaurant is finished, Rowland said, but museum trustees have decided not to touch it until they've raised $100 million more. Then the planned makeover of LACMA West can begin, with no fear of bond-related liquidity problems.

Rowland said that the "negative" ratings outlook from Moody's isn't likely to mean higher interest rates on the museum's bonds, but Mitchell said the change is "one shot over the bow," signaling the analysts' concern about possible consequences if fundraising doesn't pick up.

On the positive side, Mitchell noted the Moody's report's praise for LACMA's "healthy operating performance" and "prudent fiscal policies," which enabled the museum to recover from a $400,000 deficit in 2008-09 by posting a $600,000 surplus in 2009-10, largely via a hiring freeze and scaling back exhibitions.

Moody's also reported that, at $53 million, the cost of the Resnick Pavilion came in $1 million under budget.

mike.boehm@latimes.com

Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times

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