June 2011

How museums can liberate artists from the treadmill of production

Museums are often as not spectators in the
sport of contemporary art collecting, writes
Maxwell Anderson, director and chief executive
of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Vertiginous
prices for the bluest of blue-chip artists are now
common, as the ever-enlarging circle of would-be
owners stretches to include Asia, the Gulf and
Latin America, putting US and European collectors
in global competition.
Which raises the question: whither, ultimately,
all of these objects, videos and installations?
The collecting of what we today call contemporary
art by private individuals has a long history. In
his “Letters to Atticus” of the 1st century BC,
Cicero pined for specific works for his villa, and
went to great lengths to have them shipped to him
posthaste. Little has changed in the intervening
two millennia—there is still stiff competition for
works believed to be ideal for a domestic setting,
along with secret lists, invisible buyers and
premiums paid for what is imagined to be the best.
But the goals are different today, since many
collectors are as invested in collecting names as in
collecting specific works. In an age of editions of
multiples—not so dissimilar from the Roman
copies of Greek statues sought by Cicero—there
are finite examples of the handiwork of much-discussed
artists, and the competition is often as not
about how a particular collector can add value to
the reputation of a given artist, as much as the
other way around.
Museums watch this dance with mounting
dismay, since the ultimate disposition of these
works is increasingly in private museums,
foundations, or collections that remain inviolate
within museums, as with recent examples at
Lacma and SFMoMA.
Collectors despair of museums putting donated
works in storage, which could be seen to mask
their taste and generosity. But curators conversely
want the intellectual freedom to pick and choose
what to show and when.
There will be many concessions ultimately
required, as the taste of the present fades and the
harsh judgment of history is rendered. In New York
the Guggenheim’s exhibition “1900: Art at the
Crossroads” illustrated this point forcefully, pitting
household names today alongside household
names a century ago. There is no better example
of the hazard of following a trend—other than
perhaps the Whitney’s storerooms, filled with
artists shown in annuals and biennials since 1932,
most of whom have never been heard of since. The
giant threshing machine known as the art market
lends credence to works of greater and lesser
staying power in equal increments, and only time
will tell whether the market of today matches up
with adjudications in the future.
At Indianapolis, we find that the best strategy is
to commission site-specific works for our
galleries, sculpture park, and this year, the US
Pavilion in Venice, rather than pursuing highly
priced works in competition with collectors and
other museums. In so doing we spend far less,
create a context that is distinctive, and give artists
an opportunity to step off the punishing treadmill
of churning out editions destined either for
faraway shores or, even worse, destined to
be forgotten.