This will be the first of a few drafts of a piece I’m tentatively calling “Met Money,” in which I take up the case of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s proposal to fund a $150 million shortfall in its collection management operations through the sale of art from those collections.
This story first hit the mainstream media in a piece published on February 5th by Robin Pogrebin in The New York Times. Denouncements of the plan were quick to follow.
To put my cards on the table: I believe museums should be set free to sell pieces from their collections to fund what, in these denouncements and elsewhere, gets derisively called “operations.”
The denouncements are backed up by a couple lines of argument, which can be described as 1. “the billionaires should save us,” and 2. “it’s a slippery slope.” There are likely one or two more, but these are the main arguments being put forward thus far, and the ones I’ll address directly as a means of pulling back to ask bigger questions about — and to challenge — the consensus that museums’ selling works of art for anything other than acquiring more works of art is an ethical breach of conduct and an inherent evil.
In general I view these and related denouncements as evidence of a rather pathetic and embarrassing lack of imagination — on the part of critics and museum leadership alike.
Only the billionaires can save us; or, Who is Willie Sutton?
The quickest and clearest denouncement of the Met’s plan to raise funds for the maintenance of its collection through collection sales — and which follows what I will call the “billionaires should save us” argument (or “billionaire argument” for short) — comes from arts writer and historian Tyler Green, who was quick off the blocks with a change.org petition demanding that the Met’s board fund whatever deficits the organization is facing:
The Met's board is responsible for the institution. It is chock-full of billionaires. Billionaire wealth alone increased $1 trillion during the first nine months of the pandemic. ("U.S. Billionaire Wealth Surges Past $1 Trillion Since Beginning of Pandemic — Total Grows to $4 Trillion," Institute for Policy Studies, Dec. 9, 2020.)
We call on the Met's board to do the job they signed up for: to give, to support the institution.
One could also call this the Willie Sutton response, after the infamous American bank robber who responded to a question about why he robbed banks by stating plainly, “Because that’s where the money is.”
On February 14, Christopher Knight, the Los Angeles Times prize-winning curmudgeon-in-residence, echoed Green’s call almost exactly, but with some added accounting thrown in:
Since the pandemic began, America’s billionaire class has seen its wealth rise to astonishing levels. Americans for Tax Fairness, a coalition of 425 national and state organizations, reports “a staggering $1.1 trillion growth in the collective wealth of America’s billionaires — a nearly 40% leap — during the past 10 months of national emergency.”
Yes, trillion.
Just for the sake of argument, let’s use Michael R. Bloomberg as an example. He’s not a Met trustee, so he won’t be pounced on at the March board meeting, but he is a well-known New York art maven and philanthropic billionaire.
According to USA Today, between mid-March and mid-October, his wealth increased by $6.9 billion. With a pledge of just 2.25% of that, he could settle the Met’s entire projected deficit all by himself.
Not 2.25% of his net worth, mind you, merely 2.25% of the unexpected pandemic windfall. I don’t know how many billionaires sit on the board of trustees, arguably the most prestigious and desirable in Manhattan, but I am comfortable going with the adjective “plenty.” Time to start writing lots more checks, or time to step aside.
One can’t help thinking Knight would have been better served by using the example of an actual Met trustee rather than Bloomberg (current net worth $54.9bn). He could have chosen from Michael B. Kim ($1.9bn), Hamilton James ($2.0bn), Howard Marks ($2.1bn), J. Tomilson Hill ($2.1bn), John Pritzker ($2.5bn), Jim Breyer ($2.6bn), Alejandro Santo Domingo ($3.2bn) or Debra Black (wife of Leon Black, $8.7bn). That’s eight billionaires (according to the Forbes Real-Time Billionaire List) out of 38 trustees (from The Met’s most recent publicly available roster).
Knight is of course right. That is “plenty.” But these billionaires aren’t quite in Bloomberg’s league. Bloomberg’s billions are, after all, double that of the rest of these trustees combined. And one-to-one his net worth is an order of magnitude larger than all but Ms Black’s. Against that kind of monster wealth, just a couple billion doesn’t sound like all that much — though of course it’s still quite a lot.
I’m not sure how much Michael B. Kim’s billions increased during the pandemic, but $150m, which is the deficit The Met is looking to overcome, is just under 8% of his total net worth. And keep in mind, net worth is not equivalent to cash. So for the sake of argument, were Kim to take on the responsibility himself, he’d need to unwind positions and sell property. Generating $150m in cash requires more than just $150m of one’s net worth. How much? Impossible to tell, but perhaps another percent, which is $19m, just for the privilege of meeting the museum’s needs. And don’t forget that The Met is not the only place that benefits from its trustees’ philanthropy. I’m sure much is pledged elsewhere, for other purposes (more on that soon too). All of which is to say, even for billionaires, $150m is a big number.
But okay, weep not for the billionaires. Sympathy for the overclass is not the point. Rather, what I want to stress is that all of the above is very much besides the point. Because if one is committed to seeing museums changed into something other than institutions whose business models are entirely contingent on the cultivation and charity of the billionaire class, then one cannot turn to the billionaire class for a bailout or, more pointedly, to dictate how that class should spend its money.
By design, the public petition and the opinion piece are instruments of applied social pressure. They are meant to induce certain behaviors. But in these circumstances, such instruments can only serve the moral aggrandizement of their authors. Because what is a couple billion dollars if not “fuck-you money.” It’s one thing to hound a trustee out of their prestigious membership club because their money doesn’t meet a moral purity test — c.f. the Warren Kanders affair at The Whitney — it’s quite another to try to publicly shame trustees into “writing more checks” or stepping aside.
The billionaire class may not be immune to shame, but it is undoubtedly immune from feeling compelled to act on it — or at least to act on it in the manner that people making the billionaire argument demand. After all, billionaires from Jeff Bezos to Patrick Soon-Shiong have been buying newspapers of late, which could give grouchy critics pause. Grouchy critics, it should be said, don’t require money; their “fuck-you” sensibilities come very much free of charge.
Confession: I am guilty of this approach myself. In April, when Alex Greenberger of Artnews reported that The Met was laying off 81 of its staff, I tweeted the following.
I even used a hashtag #shameonthemet (which had I been paying attention I would have realized was dominated by tweets aimed at the UK’s Metropolitan Police). But I will note that I pointed to the two other areas of institutional capital that could be easily deployed to keep the museum’s employees’ paychecks intact: the endowment (long-term portfolio assets), which had a 2020 fair value of $3.63bn; and the “assets,” by which I meant the collection, whose value is not recorded. One must assume that, like Bloomberg’s billions, it is at least one and perhaps two orders of magnitude larger than the endowment.
Importantly, gifts of art to the museum are not recorded as revenue, whereas purchases of art for the collection are recorded as decreases in the museum’s net assets, and proceeds from the sales of art are recorded as net assets “with donor restrictions” for the acquisition of art. (I’ll have more to say on this, but for a brilliant polemic on the scandal that it is — and I believe it is a scandal — read Michael O’Hare’s 2015 essay in Democracy.)
I raise this because that bit about donor restrictions must be kept in mind when considering the implications of the billionaire argument. Gifts of money, especially big gifts, come with strings attached, even if they might be thought of as bailouts — one-time transfers to help support an organization facing an existential economic threat. One could see such transfers coming with significant strings attached, such as oversight requirements, demands for cost cuts in other areas of activity, or — less on the tiresome managerial side and more on the soft-power side — access to, and suasion on, the specific committees that determine policy and grade performance. Gift economies entail obligations.
What that money buys, in other words, is elite entrenchment. Every additional dollar that comes from the pockets of an individual donor, or a small coterie of donors — indeed, any museum operation that can be shown to depend on such dollars — will entrench the authority (fiduciary, decision-making, programmatic) that many museum observers today find, to use the loaded terminology of the activist left, “problematic.”
Many of the most passionate and considered calls for museum reform acknowledge that change has to happen at the top. Consider Olga Viso’s touchstone 2018 Op-Ed in The New York Times, “Decolonizing the Art Museum: The Next Wave,” in which she notes that:
Systemic change takes time, vision and nuanced leadership at every level, most especially among donors and museum boards. Selfless investment and fortitude are required. So is a willingness to endure discomfort [emphasis added]. To move forward, the entire ecosystem must devote itself to a longer game.
Whether you agree or disagree with the calls for the transformation of elite museum culture — and yes, we are talking about an “elite” culture, regardless of how much one intones the “community” mantra — one cannot ignore the fact that institutions that are structurally and operationally dependent upon massive inequalities of wealth, and the beneficent transfer of that wealth to the institution, from time to time and at the whim of the wealth holder, cannot but replicate and perpetuate both those inequalities and the interests and values that subtend them.
Calls such as Vigo’s are earnest and well-meaning. But what they’re after are cultural transformations that, at the individual level, require alterations of attitudes. Leadership and boards that have the “right” attitude will have the “right” values and invest in the “right” interests of the institution.
Culture is the arena in which such attitudes are formed. But when I think about such calls for cultural transformations of wealth, I can’t help recalling F. Scott Fitzgerald telling Earnest Hemingway that “The rich are different from you and me.” To which Hemingway replied, “Yes, they have more money.” The key point being that, “more is different,” that quantitative differences do not just create differences of degree, they create differences of kind. And in the context of museum culture, culture’s of leadership and board governance (culture’s of wealth to be sure), more money means a different culture. Billionaires don’t think like you and me. They don’t inhabit the same world. There are customs, mores, and languages unique to that culture of extreme wealth, and it is within that culture that billionaire board members’ attitudes are formed.
What is more, the current political climate is one in which severe inequalities of wealth are regarded, rightly, as damaging, both to the growing numbers of people who do not have enough wealth to sustain themselves (or their families) let alone to thrive, and to the growing numbers of people who have so much wealth that any regard they have for something like a “commonwealth” is informed as much by their missionary work in the field as the view from their Gulfstream jets. This is of course the political climate so aptly captured by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s policy advisor Dan Riffle when he tweeted out that “Every billionaire is a policy failure,” and which informed so much of the 2020 presidential campaign, at least on the left.
The policy response to this problem is taxation, which is a taking, not a gift. In the museum case, within the context of not-quite-peer pressure coming from newspaper critics and change.org petitions, what is being demanded amounts not exactly to a taking, but one doesn’t also exactly demand a gift either. The critics would state that this is an imperfect solution to the urgent problem of an immediate budget deficit, and that what is actually called for is more taxation of billionaire wealth, with some healthy portion of those takings going to the arts.1 That’s one solution, but it’s far from the best use of taxpayer dollars.2 It’s also politically inexpedient and undesirable, as it would make of every museum leader a political hack.
If only there were some way to fund The Met and other museum’s operations and initiatives that would avoid elite entrenchment, obviate the need for the cultural reeducation of billionaire attitudes, and head off the bureaucratic politics and unsavory prospects of government intervention in the arts.
More on that in the next draft, which you can read here, Met Money 2, and then more here, Met Money 3.
If you’ve found any of the above interesting, please share with friends and colleagues. SubStack makes commenting easy and, as I’ll continue to say, these are drafts, so please point out my inevitable mistakes (of grammar and logic) and missed opportunities.
Thank you for reading.
The budget of the National Endowment for the Arts is the measure of how much the US government is seen to honor the arts in America. This is an unfortunate artifact of the culture wars of the 1980s, and it’s a poor measure. Today its budget is as much political call to arms for left and right alike as a resource for arts institutions and initiatives. See Tyler Cowan’s under appreciated book Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding (Princeton, 2006)
It seems worth noting here that it’s not even close to the best use of charitable dollars, as anyone who has even a passing familiarity with Effective Altruism knows. [And for anyone curious, yes, it was at just this point in writing this first piece that I discovered SubStack’s footnote function.]