Move over,
Hugh Davies. Move over,
Richard Armstrong.
Here comes Christine Miles, director of the
Albany Institute of History & Art, writing in opposition to the
Brodsky Bill in the Albany Times Union:
Read the rest of this entry »
I have a
piece in the summer issue of
The Art Newspaper on deaccessioning. It should all sound pretty familiar to regular readers of the blog, but it was nice to have the opportunity to lay out some of the arguments in a more sustained way and for a different audience. (Quick, somebody get
Assemblyman Brodsky a subscription!) An excerpt:
Read the rest of this entry »
In this week's
Time, Richard Lacayo looks back on the 20th anniversary of the "
Mapplethorpe Wars," including the criminal obscenity trial in Cincinnati: "Make no mistake, the battle over Mapplethorpe resulted in sustained harm to arts funding in the U.S."
Read the rest of this entry »
Robin Pogrebin has
the latest in the New York Times. She mentions the June 1
letter from "more than a dozen major cultural institutions" (including the Met, MoMA, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney) pleading with legislators to slow down. But Brodsky is unmoved: "the problem of deaccessioning is real and growing" and "the need for action is immediate."
Read the rest of this entry »
The big news just before the weekend was that the city of Long Beach was, according to an LA Times
headline, "threatening" the Long Beach Museum of Art with the "sale of artwork."
Read the rest of this entry »
Felix Salmon says Thomas Kinkade is "
bad, not evil": "The store owners ... lost money when ... the internet made secondary-market values of Kinkade’s work much more transparent. Suddenly, the enormous growth in past Kinkade sales was no longer a good thing: there were a lot of Kinkades to go around, and many of the buyers were people who bought on the assumption that their paintings would increase in value and they could make money on their investment. Up until the arrival of the internet, that worked for Kinkade, whose company set the prices for all his paintings and would raise them steadily. After the arrival of the internet, a whole industry arose buying and selling Kinkades at market-set, rather than Kinkade-set, prices. And that was the end of the success days for the company: without monopoly pricing power, Kinkade was nothing. The stores failed, ultimately, not because Kinkade treated them badly, and not because other stores were undercutting them. The stores failed because Kinkades are a commodity, and anybody wanting to buy one could get a second-hand Kinkade online at a much lower price than that charged at retail. Buyers no longer believed that their paintings would increase in value, so they bought fewer than they used to. And when they did buy, they were likely to buy already-existing Kinkades rather than new ones."
Read the rest of this entry »
