Should Detroit Sell Its Art?

The fiscal apocalypse that is Detroit has spun off a collateral storm in the art world with a suggestion that salvific funds—an estimate of two billion dollars is much bandied—could be raised by selling treasures of the Detroit Institute of Arts, one of America’s best encyclopedic museums. Having been asked my opinion as an art-lover—and, incidentally, a citizen, though not of Detroit—I have two answers. Here’s the short one: sell. The long one, which follows, ends in the same place, only garlanded with regrets.

What is the worth of a municipal museum? Nora Caplan-Bricker, writing in The New Republic, gauged it this way in June: “Every person should have the chance, not just to see art, but to live down the street from it.” That eloquently evokes the ineffable benefits, of identity and of self-esteem, that a city’s museums may bestow even on people who never visit them. The prospective departure of the D.I.A.’s touchstones by Jan van Eyck, Fra Angelico, Bellini, Titian, Rembrandt, Velásquez, Brueghel, Goya, Cézanne, and van Gogh—merely to sample the starry list of possible sacrificial victims—thus suggests intolerable violence to the very soul of Detroit’s suffering body. It’s a strong argument, other things being equal; but other things are not.

This week, Caplan-Bricker has augmented her emotive case with cold economic calculations, of a sort lately familiar when defenders of the arts must answer to cost-cutting politicians: how much wealth cultural institutions generate for communities. Her intricate math, based on recent studies, produces a ballpark guess of ten million “tourist dollars” a year brought into Detroit by the D.I.A. That doesn’t sound like a lot, what with the hovering reverie of a quick two billion. But what do I know? Anything that a sufficient number of people in green eyeshades declare, I’ll endorse. Meanwhile, there remains the easily comprehended fact of an urban disaster perched in scales against a less clear, in fact purely notional, threat to art.

Art works have migrated throughout history. Unless destroyed, they are always somewhere. It’s best when they are on public display, but if they have special value their sojourns in private hands are likely temporary. At any rate, they are hardly altered by inhabiting one building rather than another. The relationship of art to the institutions that house and display it is a marriage of convenience, with self-interest on both sides, and not an ineluctable romance. I demur from the hysterical piety, among many of my fellow art folk, that regularly greets news of museum deaccessions—though I do wish museums would have the guts to abjure that weasel word for selling things off. (Paging George Orwell.) A museum may thereby maim itself; but the art takes no notice. Protest as we should a local institution’s short-sighted or venal behavior, we must admit at least a sliver of light between such issues and art’s immemorial claims on our solicitude.

The clincher for me was voiced by a spokesman for the state-appointed emergency manager Kevyn D. Orr. Caplan-Bricker commendably quotes it, from the Times: “It’s hard to go to a pensioner on a fixed income and say, ‘We’re going to cut 20 percent of your income or 30 percent or whatever the number is, but art is eternal.’ ” To expatiate: Vita brevis, ars longa. Art will survive. The pensioner will not. I do not view the impending decision as a close call.

Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Peter Schjeldahl