Culture Chronicle

Sanctions Are Ending For Museum
The New York Times - October 18, 2010
By Robin Pogrebin


When the National Academy Museum sold two important Hudson River School paintings in 2008 to pay its bills, the Association of Art Museum Directors came down hard with sanctions, making the academy a pariah in the museum world and a symbol for the evils of deaccessioning.

Now the association has removed the scarlet letter. On Oct. 4 the association's board voted unanimously to suspend its sanctions in recognition of the academy's actions over the last 20 months toward better financial planning and management.

"We've decided the National Academy has put all the steps in place that we wanted to see for it to be a healthy organization that would not contemplate deaccessioning for operating purposes in the future," said Kaywin Feldman, president of the Association of Art Museum Directors and president of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

The academy case suggests that sanctions -- which banned loans and other program collaborations between the academy and the association's members -- can be effective as a deterrent, especially in New York where regulatory and legislative efforts to curb such sales have stalled or failed. "Sanctions really hurt," Carmine Branagan, the academy's director, said in an interview Monday. "You're completely incapable of designing exhibition programming going forward because you can't loan and you can't get loans, and sanctions also affect funding. Sanctions were very, very painful."

Ms. Branagan said the approach by the association had been good for the museum, prompting a series of measures that made it stronger. "The standards that" the association "is holding museums to are the standards that museums should be holding themselves to," she said. "They don't have expectations that museums shouldn't have of themselves." Ms. Branagan was appointed director in December 2008.

The sale of the Hudson River landscapes by the museum, which is on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, had heightened concerns that, in an economic downturn, cultural institutions would turn to their collections to plug shortfalls.

"The National Academy's actions violated one of our most core beliefs: that the collection is sacred and not a fungible asset," Ms. Feldman said. "We thought it was very important to make that statement, that they had acted improperly, and that A.A.M.D. as an organization did not condone that behavior. And we also wanted to see positive change for the organization."

In the aftermath of that sale and others the New York State Board of Regents began debating whether to make permanent a set of regulations regarding deaccessioning while state lawmakers considered a bill to block the practice. But neither the regulations nor the law were adopted, in part because some of the state's major cultural institutions argued they were unnecessary. Proponents say they plan to continue their efforts.

Even with the lifting of the sanctions, the 184-year-old academy, which also has a school, is not completely in the clear. The association's board also voted to establish a five-year probation period during which it will review the academy's progress, even as loans between the academy and the its members may resume. For the full article, click here