Changing of the Guard,” 1988

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Changing of the Guard,” 1988

PART 1

FREDERICK WOOLWORTH Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Fred Woolworth. I’m president of the Art Dealers Association of America, which represents and includes 126 of the most important fine art visual dealers across America. We’re very happy to be here tonight to present the Seventh Annual Art Dealers Association lecture series which runs from tonight each Tuesday through October 25. I want to take this opportunity to thank the staff of the Guggenheim and the director, Tom Krens, for giving us this space for this evening. [00:01:00] And it’s my honor to introduce the moderator of tonight, Mr. Charlie Cowles, who I’ve known for many, many years, the former publisher of Art Forum, curator of the Seattle, Washington Museum, president and owner of the Charles Cowles Gallery, and Chairman of the Board of the New York Studio School, which is a small art school, which has its offices in the old Whitney Building on Eighth Street. Charles, if you could introduce your panel. Thank you.

CHARLES COWLES Thank you. I’d like to thank you all for coming. I see we have a full house. (applause) [00:02:00] We have not spent hours rehearsing this. I’m going to introduce each of the participants and ask them then to introduce themselves by talking about their recent past and hopeful future, and that’s the future is really what this panel’s all about, that we need to know a little bit about the past to go into the future. So, with that, we will start with Tom Krens, who is the director of this institution and our host in a certain way this evening. We’re glad to be here and if you’d like to say something?

THOMAS KRENS Well, Charles said five minutes to describe what you do and what you’d like to do. As some of you may know, I’ve just taken over the Guggenheim Foundation, or taken over, I was appointed its director on July 1, so I’ve only been here really for three months. For the last 17 years, I’ve been at Williams College where I teach in the Art Department, and have been for the past eight years, the director of the College Museum. That experience has also included supervising two new additions to the College Museum and a fairly substantial staff expansion. Since late 1986, I’ve been involved in an interesting project [00:03:00] in Massachusetts, it’s called the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. We call it Mass MOCA. One of its most distinguishing features is that it doesn’t exist yet, although we do have the authorization from the state for a $35 million bond issue and a commitment from a large industrial manufacturer, Sprague Technologies, to give the land and buildings which are about 20 acres, 28 buildings, and about 750,000 square feet of space. [00:04:00] It’s our intention to build a Museum of Contemporary Art with the partial qualification that it may be art simply of the last 30 years. One of the centerpieces of that enterprise from the art side will be the collection of Dr. and Mrs. Panza, who I notice are in the audience today, having just arrived, I believe, yesterday from Milan. Not for this panel, by the way, but it was coincidental. That’s the recent past. With respect to the future, [00:05:00] I hope you all noticed the construction trailer on the north side of the building as you came in today. The construction on the new Guggenheim addition began last Friday. It is our expectation that it will take three years to complete. And that construction will include a complete restoration of the existing Frank Lloyd Wright building both on the outside,

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 1 of 26 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Changing of the Guard,” 1988 with its surface materials needing or are in great need of care, and on the inside. [00:06:00] Coincidentally, with that activity, I think it will be my charge over the next three years to try to develop the best contemporary twentieth-century exhibitions program in New York City. If I don’t say this now, somebody else will, but (laughter) Kirk and I have also promised to schedule a motorcycle race down Fifth Avenue beginning at the Guggenheim and ending at 53rd Street, so we might do that for the panel discussion next year. In any case, I expect that those activities will pretty much keep me occupied [00:07:00] over the next three years. Beyond that, I think it’s a little bit difficult to predict.

CHARLES COWLES Thank you very much. And we’ll hear more later. Julia Brown Turrell is the director of the Des Moines Art Center in Des Moines, Iowa, a very fine small museum in the Midwest, which I hope you’ve all visited. But in case you haven’t, Julia will tell us a little bit about it.

JULIA BROWN TURRELL Thank you, Charlie. My most recent past has involved the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles where I was for five and a half years as senior curator. And there I was responsible for the exhibition and publication program and was one of the first curators and one of a small group of people that put that new institution into being. I came from that experience to an institution very, very different, the Des Moines Art Center, which actually is not so small. [00:08:00] It’s a museum of three buildings, one by Saarinen, one by I.M. Pei, and one by Richard Meier. And I inherited a wonderful, wonderful collection put together by [Jim Demetrian?] over a period of 15 years that he was there. And I am planning to continue it, the tradition that he began of searching for really key important individual works, but extending that collection into our outdoor spaces. The museum is located in a very beautiful park. So, we are developing a sculpture park of commissioning environmental pieces and are right now working with Robert Irwin and Chris Naumann, Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Sera, and C. Armajani to develop pieces for, large-scale pieces for the park. [00:09:00] And also, beginning to initiate exhibitions for the museum. The museum primarily had its focus on building the collection and we are beginning to do an ambitious exhibition program, but not in large-scale but in very focused individual exhibitions that will travel and catalogues that hopefully are distinguished by a unique character and very beautiful design in production. We are doing an exhibit of Bill Viola’s work with the Frankfurt Museum, Joel Shapiro, tracing the figure in his work from the last 20 years, a Sol LeWitt wall drawing show that will move into a commissioned work for the museum, a retrospective of Louis Baltz’s photography. So, these are just some of the directions we are moving in. We are also trying to develop collaborations with existing, some of [00:10:00] the special things that are there in Iowa, such as the writer’s workshop, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop which is known around the world. And we are doing a series of poetry readings with them, and also developing a book where poets will be invited to be commissioned to do poems on individual works in the collection which will then be gathered together in a special publication on the collection. We’re also doing a catalogue on the collection for children and starting a children’s membership program with, particularly with talks with arts for children. So, basically, what I’m trying to do there is take, build on a very good foundation, a very firm tradition and commitment that has served this institution and taking it into new directions, and it’s going very well.

CHARLES COWLES

I wish you all the best of luck. I go to Des Moines every [00:11:00] now and then for God knows why. It has for the last 25 years (laughter), Des Moines for the last 25 years has had a population of 200,000 people. It has not grown or shrunk, and yet it is one of the finest museums in a small town in the country. It’s really an amazing place. And a very supportive board and I think we’ll hear some great things from Julia in the future. Next, Rick Bretell, the new director of the Dallas Museum, which is one of my favorite buildings. I love Edward Larrabee Barnes’s building. And I hear there are sorts of wonderful things happening down there in the near future, assuming that there is no great economic upheaval. Why don’t you tell us what’s going on?

RICHARD BRETELL Well, I think it’s wonderful that the American Art Dealers Association still thinks there’s enough money in Dallas to invite me tonight. (laughter) [00:12:00] As one should never apologize for remarks, but you should all know that I went to bed at 2:00 in the morning last night in Moscow, and I woke up at 5:30 this morning to come here. And so, therefore, if anything that I say makes sense, it’s a miracle. I started out in fact in Texas, my first job was at the University of Texas at Austin. And I arrived in August of 1976 when it was nine billion degrees and 300 percent humidity from Oxford, and where I had been working on Pissaro drawings. I taught there for four years and then was at the Art Institute of Chicago for eight years as curator of European paintings and sculpture intermittently, the latter. And since April Fool’s Day, I’ve been in Dallas. (laughter) [00:13:00] I guess, of my yesterday, the three, my three favorite things of my past are three projects. One of them was an exhibition I did from the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago about frames. And when I came to the Art Institute, I began to realize that I was a conventionally trained academic art historian who knew a good deal more about slides than about paintings. And that I was curator of Paintings, and that a lot of the questions that people asked of me were about the frames. And so, that it behooved me to learn about the frames. (laughter) And so, I did from our exhibition, from our collection, a big catalogue and inventory which really changed a lot of people’s ways of thinking about frames and certainly educated me. [00:14:00] There was a kind of joint educational process, both the community, the scholarly community, and the general community, and myself. And it was a wonderful project to do. And it’s something that I’ve become, begun to believe in a lot because I think we pay a good deal too much attention in our profession to exhibitions, and that we pay a good deal too little attention to the collections that we purport to build. And that I think a little bit more of event psychology, exhibition event psychology applied to collections would be good, and the frames exhibition was my first real experience at that. I guess, the second thing that I would say was my favorite thing from the past is three pot-boiler books that I did for [00:15:00] Abrahms about the nineteenth-century pictures in the Art Institute. And what I learned from doing that, those three books, was that there was a lot I didn’t know about nineteenth-century painting, frames and otherwise. There was a lot that in the files of this very august and famous institution was neither up-to-date nor accurate. And that I learned more in the last year and a half about my field in the history of art working on these popular pot-boiler books than I had learned when I was in graduate school. And I learned another important lesson for me which is part of what I’ll say in a minute, which is that at museums, we do very little to educate people [00:16:00] other than putting things on walls. And that our files and that our libraries and the things that we know are resources about works of art are, in general, chaotic and inaccessible. And I think that’s a crime and that we ought to do something about it as a profession. I guess, my third favorite thing, and I won’t go over five minutes, I promise, is that is the Gauguin exhibition, which Kirk was one of

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 3 of 26 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Changing of the Guard,” 1988 the original triumvirate and he, for pressing reasons, had to back out, in a recent review, has said that the entire enterprise crumbled as a result of that, and perhaps it did. In any event, what I learned from the Gauguin exhibition was I learned a lot about Gauguin and I learned a lot about doing big highly negotiated exhibits. But I also learned that I didn’t know anything about the world, [00:17:00] that I am a kind of euro-centric, classically trained American, who is from the West, and it was an education on the East Coast. And I’ll never forget getting off the plane in Buenos Aires with Charlie Stuckey. And we thought we were in Buenos Aires to look at five Gauguins, and neither of us knew a thing about South America. And I learned a lot more about South America and I deranged my own world more as a result of the Gauguin exhibition and its travels than I did learn about Gauguin. And I think that those lessons will be very useful to me in Dallas. (laughter) (applause)

CHARLES COWLES [00:18:00] Thank you very much. (laughter) Last, but not least, Kirk Varnedoe, who we all know is the new director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, which everybody knows that he runs the museum, even though he’s not called the director of the museum. And we’d like to hear from you next.

KIRK VARNEDOE Thank you. Recent past was here in New York City. I taught at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU up until this past summer and I just took over my post at the Modern the first of August. But I’ve been working as an adjunct curator at the Modern for the last few years. I, amongst past projects in the recent past, I co-directed with William Reuben, the Primitivism exhibition, and I directed the Vienna 1900 exhibition [00:19:00] a year or two ago. For the future of the Modern, I think I have some of the same complaints that everybody has about space and about the limitations of the space we’re now in. The problem of expanding a museum is a problem any museum faces, can it go on forever? Is the Metropolitan going to devour Central Park finally and completely? In our case, it’s a practical financial and spatial problem that’s linked very deeply to the philosophical nature of what our museum is. When we first opened, the question was, can you be a museum and be modern, can this exist? And we’re still being asked the question [00:20:00] whether we can honor our commitment to a permanent collection of great masterpieces from the past and at the same time be engaged in some vital way with contemporary art. I believe very firmly that we can and that’s one of the things that I would like what I can do at the museum to prove in the exhibition program and the collecting program, in the way that I’ll try to expand the space. I think that our permanent collection of twentieth- century art gives us a very unique opportunity to speak to contemporary art, to deal with it, to acquire it in the context of our collection, to show it in the context of the history of modern innovation. And I would very much like to make that work for us in a very [00:21:00] strong fashion. I want to try to do the kinds of shows, for example, that I think the Modern is uniquely equipped to do, that in the spirit in which that museum was first created by Alfred Barr and others, to break down the standard hierarchies between media, the standard divisions between, in the case of the new exhibition I’m doing, the so-called isolated domains of avant-garde art, and broader aspects of society and popular culture. That exhibition, which is the one project that I would mention is for 1990 and it’s called “High and Low, Modern Art and Popular Culture,” and it’s going to deal with the interchange between modern painting and sculpture from the turn of the century [00:22:00] until now, with domains of popular culture such as advertising, graffiti,

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 4 of 26 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Changing of the Guard,” 1988 the transformation of functional objects, and comics and caricature. That kind of exhibition, an exhibition which is not simply a monograph of a great artist, that which is not simply the latest report on a young artist but which tries to knit together something which I believe is vital and important about contemporary art, with the history of that question, with that issue as it stretches back into the very roots of what made Modern Art modern, that’s the kind of challenging exhibition I would like to see us do. But one of the other resources that I will work with at the Modern, and which I think is very important, is that [00:23:00] I’m not director of the museum, I’m director of one department with many other distinguished departments: Architecture and Design, Photography, Drawings, Works on Paper, Prints, all of these departments have built up. This is a different museum than the one Alfred Barr founded. It’s now one with many more people working in it, many more minds at work, a much larger collection. I see that as a very unique opportunity to work with a lot of talented people in a kind of synergy. I also want to do a show that right after High and Low called Marey, Muybridge and Modernism, about chrono- photography and its origins in the late nineteenth century, and its effects straight through into minimalism and beyond, with the unsuspected number of artists who found inspiration in this kind of work. That’s something I’ll do in collaboration with another department. [00:24:00] Using the kinds of structures that the museum has and the kind of collection it has which I believe are unparalleled in ways that I don’t think have been fully exploited before, these are sort of the greatest challenges that I look forward to.

CHARLES COWLES Thank you very much. One thing I’d like to explore very briefly from each of you is, when you accepted your position, what promises were you able to extract from your trustees and patrons about the future of the museum? In other words, what had the previous director been locked into that you were able to free up in taking this position? What are you looking forward to, what new freedom are you looking forward to at the museum? Tom, do you want to deal with that? Or you can pass on this, if you want to.

THOMAS KRENS How many passes do we get?

CHARLES COWLES And, also, what, (laughter) [00:25:00] also, what is your role in relationship to your trustees and patrons? For instance, are you a director of the Guggenheim Foundation, are you a director of Venice? What exactly do you see as your technical role and what new freedoms are you looking for?

THOMAS KRENS Well, I think the first thing that comes to mind in trying to respond to a question as complicated as that is to point out something that’s probably obvious by now after you’ve heard each of us say something about the situation that we’re in and where we’ve come from. And that is, that observation is that there is no such thing as a generic museum. That the museums are in many ways, the organizations are [00:26:00] creatures of their physical limitations, the scope and scale of their collections, the number of people that work in the organizations, the number of departments that exist within a museum. The Guggenheim is very different and very distinct, obviously, even within New York City, and even within the other museums in Manhattan that deal with fundamentally twentieth-century art. It’s different because its tradition is basically

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 5 of 26 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Changing of the Guard,” 1988 through a family foundation and was founded on a single collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection of Non-Objective Art. It does have through, essentially, a curious twist of fate and the persistence of Tom Messer, [00:27:00] another museum in Venice, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. And together, the Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation runs these two museums. Now, a lot derives from that kind of, that very special association. The fact that it fundamentally was and is in transition from a private collection, an individual’s museum, which I expect to hear more about. I believe that’s on one of your panel discussion topics several weeks hence. But the evolution for the Guggenheim is from a family and individual museum to a public institution. In all legal ways, [00:28:00] that transition has taken place. In other ways, that process is still in formation. The institution is also bounded by a very specific building. Physical situations, both here and in Venice, of the difficulty of expanding here in New York has been one of the dominant things that has forced an imprint on the institution of the Guggenheim over the last five years. The process of winning of approval through has, I think was begun in earnest really in 1970 or 1984, and it’s taken till now at great cost, and great trauma and sacrifice within the institution, to try to just define [00:29:00] what kind of future it faced. I mean, one of the fundamental problems is if you do not know what kind of space you are going to be operating on, in, and even if you don’t know whether or not the institution that you’re working with will be indeed open in a particular period of time, it puts a very severe strain on the staff and it makes future planning almost impossible from any perspective. I agree with Rick’s comment about the permanent collection being the fundamental strength of the institution and something that should be emphasized a great deal. I think that’s implicit in all the comments you’ve heard so far. But even to the degree which you use the permanent collection is going to be punctuated [00:30:00] and moderated by important exhibitions, and the ability to be able to deal with those exhibitions, to deal with a future program, as far as the Guggenheim is concerned, has been compromised severely by the indecision or the lack of a clear direction until fairly recently as to what the schedule and timing were going to be. The role that the trustees face in that, I’m going to go back to original question finally. The role that I face with respect to the trustees is that it’s probably a trustee structure that is unique as well. I mean, as director of the Guggenheim Foundation, I’m also the director of two museums, [00:31:00] one in New York and one in Venice. I’m also an elected member of the board of trustees. So, that in itself suggests a different kind of relationship. I think that it wasn’t really a question of concessions that had to be won from the board of trustees over the time that I discussed this position with them, it was more I think a question of finding that common ground for the Guggenheim at a fairly difficult point in its history. And that difficulty has been, I think, framed very much by the timing of the building program. I found a board of trustees that were extremely anxious [00:32:00] and interested in working together to put the building in proper perspective, to seek a definition for the institution as it moved into the 21st Century. And it wasn’t so much a question of having to work a special arrangement really, as much as it was to in a series of discussions identify a number of common goals and objectives with a great degree of latitude. I mean, I tend to think, and based on simply my knowledge of other institutions and my friendship with a large number of colleagues in the profession, that this in terms of the authority to move in broad directions quickly, [00:33:00] the Guggenheim may be the most interesting directorial position in the country.

CHARLES COWLES Okay. In the case of Julia Turrell, where she lives in what is a very first-rate community, but she

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 6 of 26 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Changing of the Guard,” 1988 is the most informed person in town about contemporary art and modern art. And she has a very supportive board of trustees, that she’s going to tell you, I’m sure. But the question, still, she knows more about art and certainly about contemporary art, than anybody else in that town or on that board, even though she’s got some good collectors there. The question is, you know, you had a very strong director who has moved away luckily for you, you’re not living in his shadow, so to speak, what freedoms did you need to ask for and what were you able to achieve for the future for the museum?

JULIA BROWN TURRELL Well, first of all, I’ll just say that there are a lot of [00:34:00] very informed people in Des Moines, and well-traveled individuals and not just collectors, but people in all different segments of the community and that’s part of the pleasures of working there. And, frankly, I came to Des Moines from having been in New York and Los Angeles and did not expect to find that kind of public to work with and that kind of a board to work with. And I’ve had a wonderful experience working with this board because of their commitment, first of all, to what a museum should be and can be, and their courage in allowing the museum to go into radical new directions because of their commitment to those ideas and the commitment to that kind of statement of quality for the museum it’s had throughout its 40 years. And what I first was [00:35:00] really told when I came and took the job was that they were looking for a director, that the museum had a very firm foundation, it had a very substantial history. And what they wanted was someone who could lead them into its next phase. They were looking for a person to make a more, a stronger and more ambitious exhibition program. They wanted someone to continue building their collection. They were open to new directions and new ideas in that regard. They needed a person to really look at greater public outreach for the museum. We had a situation where the museum was very well-thought of but also thought of as that museum up on the hill on the west side, and there was a need for greater public outreach and ways of working with the community and broaden our audience. [00:36:00] And it’s been interesting to think of ways to do that that have been innovative and dealing with many different segments of the community. And there was also a very clear need to develop a fundraising strategy and begin a fundraising office which the museum actually hadn’t had before, a development office. So, a large part of my job has also been really to build partnerships with the corporate community and develop a more, a really sophisticated fundraising campaign for the institution. So, it’s been a situation with a board that is very much a working board. I work very closely with the board as a whole and with individual committees, but they were looking and are looking and relying on me to lead this institution into its next life.

CHARLES COWLES [00:37:00] Do you want to make any comments about your patrons or board or what you had to push them toward?

RICHARD BRETELL Well, I think, I mean, I was much too naïve to wring any concessions out of my board. (laughter) So, I don’t think I did. But in the end, my situation, as everybody points out, is different than all the situations in that it’s a big public institution, though I would say that there is a huge board, 80 people. I mean, the board meetings are almost like this. (laughter) And I said when I first met the board that it would be my largest and best-informed and best-educated seminar, and that if I could control it as well as I controlled my other seminars that I would be

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 7 of 26 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Changing of the Guard,” 1988 lucky. And I think in the end, the board at the Dallas Museum controls less than a quarter of the operating budget [00:38:00] of the institution. So, the board, though very big and very important socially and some intellectually as a driving force in the museum, is not very strong financially. And it’s an institution which is much more oriented towards membership and city support. And so, that my mission is not so board-driven as perhaps other people sitting on this panel.

CHARLES COWLES Thank you. Now, Kirk, we presume, is insulated because he has a director of the museum to protect him from the board of trustees. We’ve also heard a rumor that your predecessor was given an office for life, a car and driver for life, and a secretary for life, and is going to be there every day watching over you. Do you want to make any comments about your freedoms [00:39:00] and what you can do?

BA The best questions.

KIRK VARNEDOE Well, first of all, you’re right, I don’t deal with the board of trustees directly, and there was no negotiation of that nature in the operation. It is a unique situation because I get coming on board immediately one of the greatest scholars of twentieth-century art in the world as one of my curators as a kind of freebie. Bill Rubin is staying on that the museum. He’s going to do a major exhibition of Picasso and Brock next year, which I don’t think anyone else in the world could do as well as he could do it. And that’s an enormous plus. Any director of any department, I think, would be grateful to have that kind of help. In addition, he can give me [00:40:00] the kind of counsel, he knows where all the skeletons are buried, and he can help me because, really, I’m more a debutante in some sense than the rest of you because I am just starting in full dress in doing museum work and administration. It’s an enormous help to me to have Bill’s guidance in doing that. But as far as relations with the trustees go, I think the Modern is a wonderful, has much less trouble than many other institutions in this regard, and it’s a great asset bliss to move in with a board of trustees like that.

CHARLES COWLES Thank you. When I was in Seattle, they had this fabulous dream that they could do blockbuster exhibitions and exhibitions would make money for the museum. [00:41:00] And they used as the example of that, of course, King Tut, and we were one of the stations of King Tut, and they did clear a million dollars on King Tut. Where it went to after they cleared it, I don’t know. (laughter) Do any of you feel that it’s possible today, in this day when you have to worry so much about fundraising, when the nature of the job really is becoming a major fundraising situation, is there any way that you can justify exhibitions on fundraising?

THOMAS KRENS Well, I think that you face a very complex situation. I think it’s important to understand the interactions of it or at least try do. I’m not sure that I do. But it seems to me that fundraising is not separate from the kind of programming that you do because really [00:42:00] when it comes down to it that the sources of funds for the institution go for capital projects for endowment and for special exhibitions projects, is more or less the same. I mean, that doesn’t mean that it’s exactly the same source that you’re getting money from, for the sponsor of a project. But what

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 8 of 26 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Changing of the Guard,” 1988 that means, I think, is that you then have to focus on what it is that you want to do. And I think we’ve had some very clear statements about the direction that an individual institution might take. I think that’s also part of the point. The idea here is that museums play a very important social function. They are the custodians, the stewards, if you will, of objects of material culture. They are the organizations [00:43:00] that are entrusted with its care. And to an increasing degree, they’re also entrusted with the interpretation and presentation of those objects. Now, to make up for the fact that they don’t have complete collections of everything within their own control, special exhibitions have developed, I mean, to allow the interpretative function, a much wider range than has traditionally been associated with museums. So, therefore, I would probably argue that the two things are connected on a general level. Now, actually, I’ll just briefly comment on the specific level. The specific level is that can exhibitions over a period of time make money? [00:44:00] You know, it depends on how you want to look at it. I think if you think realistically about running an institution, let’s say, that a museum does five exhibitions a year that it organizes, which isn’t unrealistic. And let’s say that most institutions will take three to five, or most projects will probably have a planning and engagement time of about four to five years from when the idea is first conceived, and you have to develop it through a conceptual stage, you have to raise money, you have to put together the project team to deal with it, all the way through its tour if it has one until the objects are basically returned to the lender. That’s a five-year project. Five projects a year, five projects or a five-year window, [00:45:00] you’re managing at any given time, 25 projects. Now, you look at those projects also from a directorial perspective as an aggregate. That is, if you know that you’re in a situation where there’s a special quality that one might have, for some reason the collection of sponsors decide that they have a major business abroad or that attracts a certain kind of audience, you might be able to plan a project that actually has a surplus in it, I mean, not necessarily a profit. There are also going to be those projects that are extraordinary projects that no matter what you do, you’re probably not going to be able to bring them in at or under budget because simply the complexity of the situation, the details, [00:46:00] the difficulty, maybe it’s an exhibition that can’t travel. So, you try to factor that in. I mean, the idea it seems to me from an administrative standpoint is that you have about 25 of these balls up in the air. The idea is not to let them hit the ground. Sometimes it’s not pretty, but I think that what you try to do is to evaluate the kinds of enterprises that the museum is going to be engaged in. I would like to think that there is a window of opportunity for institutions like art museums to be better organized than they have been in the past. That’s not a commentary on the past, it’s more a commentary on the present that [00:47:00] the environment’s changing, it’s becoming harder to survive out there in the world. There are more museums better at what they do. I mean, I think that you can even begin to get a sense of that from the comments made so far in the discussion that there are lots of very, very bright people in major institutions, not just in the United States, but all over the world. And essentially, in a certain way, there’s a competition. It’s not necessarily competition for, that’s going to be measured by whether two institutions cross the finish line at the same time, but they’re competing for the same pools of support. They’re competing for the same loans. They’re competing for the same publishers. They’re competing for the same ideas. And you come up with an idea at any given time and you’ll find three or four other curators or three or four other institutions throughout the world [00:48:00] who are also thinking about the same thing from a slightly different perspective. And the institution that gets to do it, is probably the one that can manifest the power and the authority to be able to do that. Part of that is a function of efficiencies in administration. I think museums in general will probably be forced to adopt

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 9 of 26 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Changing of the Guard,” 1988 attitudes and management structures that are probably more commonly associated with sophisticated business concerns rather than cultural ones.

RICHARD BRETELL But how do we coordinate ourselves? I mean, what you’re suggesting is that we do things more together, and we plan these intertwined activities more intelligently than we have?

THOMAS KRENS Well, I’m saying two things. I think there’s an internal level of organization that can take place [00:49:00] within a given institution to increase its productivity, if you want to put it on those terms. Other than that, I think it’s a question of, among institutions, it’s a question of what steps institutions might feel that they can do to, let’s say, maybe not organize as many exhibitions. I don’t know if that’s quite the thing. I mean, I think there are areas that you can move into to try to contain costs on insurance, for example. I mean, that kinds of situations of indemnification that exist among countries now, they might be able to exist among museums. I mean, because insurance is one of the most crushing burdens that you face when you’re doing, trying to put together exhibitions projects. So, there are issues like that. Without being specific, I think we might be able to make a list. But I think just in general, [00:50:00] the idea that I think that there are efficiencies of organization both within and among institutions that we’re going to be forced to take and, unfortunately, not all institutions will be able to participate.

JULIA BROWN TURRELL I also really question the validity or interest in doing blockbuster exhibitions. And at this point, I think that the experience of art which, hopefully, is more contemplative, and perhaps could be slowed down a little bit. Where, as Tom was saying, you don’t do a show every six weeks or you don’t, and they don’t have to all be huge and they don’t have to all be terribly expensive. I mean, you can do a small publication with a very good essay and very good reproductions beautifully produced that has a terrific impact and lasts for a long time, and it doesn’t have to be 600 pages. And I think the same thing for these huge exhibitions where millions of dollars go towards assembling something [00:51:00] with many, many objects and crowds of people come and everyone’s exhausted.

RICHARD BRETELL Well, the funny thing is that also we have this myth that we’re reaching a mass audience. And in fact, we’re reaching a miniscule audience. And if one looks at the attendance in most of the major urban art museums before World War I, they were a much larger percentage of the population of those cities, who went to the museums than now, even though we think that we’re much more popular than they were. And in a funny way, even when we do blockbusters, we appeal to a very small part of the population, oftentimes less than one percent or two percent of a total urban population. And so that in the end, we are producing these hideous experiences for most people, and I think we all agree [00:52:00] about that. And we’re doing it for a tiny percent of the audience. And one wonders what our motives are. (laughter)

CHARLES COWLES Well, can we assume that you want everybody in Dallas to come four times a year to the museum?

RICHARD BRETELL No, I think that, I don’t know, we have to do other things than exhibitions. I mean, that’s what everybody’s saying, that it’s not, we’ve been, you know, I’ve had O’Keefe and in Mexico, and we’ve had, you know, 20,000 people a day in the museum on the weekends. And if you can imagine, 20,000 people. I mean, the Dallas Museum is a big museum, but it’s, you know, it’s 210,000 square feet, 65,000 square feet of exhibition space. And that means that it’s jammed. And what everybody thinks when they’re in the museum at those times, I mean, I don’t even know, [00:53:00] I have no idea, and I run the institution. (laughter) And I wonder, you know, about, I wonder about the validity of it. I do. The trustees love it, they think that it’s wonderful. And I do, too, because I think that in the end, we ought to appeal to a greater percentage of the people than we do, and that we need to use the media to do it. We need to get outside. We need to be a little [Mel Rovian?] except use, you know, film and video and other forms than the exhibition to reach a mass audience.

CHARLES COWLES Kirk, do you want to make any comments?

KIRK VARNEDOE Yeah, it’s a very difficult proposition because a lot of people remember the days, you always hear these stories, I remember when I used to be able to go to the Egyptian wing at the Met and sit there and look at these dusty mummies and they were so fascinating, and it was very funky [00:54:00] and there was nobody else there. And that was what was really wonderful. And there’s a deep element of truth in that, that something about what is wonderful about going to a museum for many people is a very private experience and a very contemplative one. But now, the museum has become some odd corner of the leisure industry (laughter) where many people go for all sorts of other reasons. And I think they probably always did, that the experience of art was always involved with picking up members of the opposite sex or the same sex or going to meet other people. And it’s always had a very complicated history of many people approaching on many different levels. But we argue, in some sense we’re peculiar institutions in society. Because it’s our job to argue, [00:55:00] I think, somehow that there are such things as hierarchies, that there are better and worse experiences, that there are better, more innovative, more original acts on the part of some artists than on the part of others, that there are richer, deeper, more complex paintings than others. That one of the jobs the museum has in some sense as a teacher or as an instructor is to go against the sense we are elitist institutions in a democratic society. And the idea of accessibility to everyone, the idea of a popular institution doesn’t necessarily mean homogenization, leveling, doesn’t mean reducing to pabulum. Do you destroy the seed corn to perform this operation? [00:56:00] It’s a great tension because one of the duties of the museum certainly is to broaden and certainly is to access. But what it should spread broadly and what it should provide greater access to, I think, is eventually by leading people into it, some sense of discrimination, some sense of insistence on this private experience, some sense of insistence on individual judgment rather than simply receiving things in waves. Ultimately, that’s what we are there to provide. And it’s very difficult to disseminate that.

RICHARD BRETELL Because the problem is we so often don’t teach people to discriminate because we never have anything bad. I mean, we’re so (laughter) (applause), because, I mean, I remember going with [Wegmann?], when I was an undergraduate, [00:57:00] to the Met. And he was bemoaning the

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 11 of 26 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Changing of the Guard,” 1988 fact that in the Rembrandt Gallery, all of the questionable pictures had been taken down. And how wonderful it had been when they were there because you could actually make discriminations. And then when the curators make the discriminations for you, it’s very difficult for you to learn. And I think it’s the same thing, that we do it in exhibitions, it’s sort of like a television set where we guide people around and we tell them what to think. And we don’t tell them what they’re not thinking. And we don’t really help them to make discrimination. We expect them to make the discriminations that we have made for them.

CHARLES COWLES Thank you. My next question is very self-serving, being an art dealer. I’d like to find out what your acquisitions plans are, your dreams? [00:58:00] (laughter) Also, how you plan to finance your acquisitions, and what can you do to set your institution apart from the others because recently we’ve seen a lot of museums sort of jumping on the band wagon, and everybody has to go out and buy the same picture their colleagues have been buying. What sort of goals do you have and how do you plan to finance them, acquisition-wise?

JULIA BROWN TURRELL Donations from dealers. (laughter)

BA (?) That was in the old days.

THOMAS KRENS Anyway, again, that’s a complex question. There are institutions that don’t have acquisitions but just that rely totally on gifts of art and gifts of money [00:59:00] to finance the acquisitions that they would like to make. The question that underlies that is what I think may be even a more important one is that what direction should a given institution, in what direction should a given institution be collecting. You know, one of the things that I’ve seen, that I’ve noticed with respect to contemporary art and there’s a certain old curatorial or collector’s credo, we’re filling gaps in the collection, as if that suggests that there is some mystical, amorphous, correct, and complete collection out there. I think maybe that’s the vestige of thinking in terms of the Age of Enlightenment and the Encyclopedia where you can really have [01:00:00] the fullest experience when you can see one of everything, a certain Noah’s Ark of objects and artists. I think that the first question for me here would be to try to find a way on building on some of the unique facets of the institution. The Guggenheim is not like the Museum of Modern Art. It doesn’t have a film collection, it doesn’t have a design collection, it doesn’t have an architecture department. It does have prints and drawings, but not to the same degree that the Modern has. So clearly, I think that our objectives would be to focus on painting and sculpture, [01:01:00] and probably to limit that activity to the twentieth century. That raises a very fundamental question I think that was touched on earlier by either Kirk or Rick is that what happens if museums are as successful in the next 100 years collecting as they have been in the last 50 years, let’s say. What happens to the institutions as they’re presently defined? You know, there are some figures that are often tossed around about what percentages of the permanent collections are in storage and whether they’re in the nineties, as is often reported or not, depends on whether you count the large painting perhaps and a tiny piece of sculpture as one object. But the fact remains that institutions are pressed, and I know the Guggenheim, [01:02:00] we rent space off-site for storage at about eight different locations in Manhattan. I mean, at great cost, we can’t show much of what we

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 12 of 26 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Changing of the Guard,” 1988 have. What that says about the future is that there’s a big problem out there. I mean, can you in good conscience go ahead collecting and then what direction should you collect? Should you seek to fill gaps in collections or should you seek a certain kind of specialty? And one of the things known about the Guggenheim, for example, is it has a great Kandinsky collection. It’s one of the things that people come here to see. You know, does that mean that perhaps the institutions in the future, or this institution in the future should think of that kind of differentiation and not try to do the same thing that every other [01:03:00] institution is doing, or should institutions simultaneously begin to think about the differences between them and that should shape their collecting? If that’s, by pointing these things out, what I’m saying is simply that that’s one of the issues that remains to be determined, though I haven’t been in position long enough to be able to say with any authority what direction that should take specifically because I think that there has to be some time for a broad discussion of these directions among the staff and the board of trustees. I can be a little bit more succinct, however, with respect to how I expect to finance them. I expect to have the money either given or the collections given to a maximum degree. Because the reality that institutions face right now is that [01:04:00] the time for museums to be able to collect objects of extraordinary quality from their own resources is way behind us. And I think that’s in part because of the prices that even contemporary artists are commanding. I mean, when you see artists in their thirties and are selling paintings for $100,000. You can go through, even if you were fortunate enough to have, let’s say, an unrestricted acquisitions budget of a million dollars, and let’s say that you want to buy one painting of some quality that relates something to other than the present, you can put your entire collection, and I’ll give you the best example. Right now, we’re about to or we’re in the process of acquiring [01:05:00] a Van Gogh for Venice, and that’s close to a $9 million proposition.

CHARLES COWLES And a bargain. (laughter)

THOMAS KRENS Because it can’t leave the country. I think that’s why it’s a bargain. But that was a very careful campaign orchestrated by Tom Esser over a number of years to develop the resources from a variety of sources to be able to put that together. That one extraordinary acquisition has dominated the acquisitions pattern of the Guggenheim for a long time and probably will.

CHARLES COWLES Thank you. Julia, it’s rumored that you have more guaranteed acquisitions funded than the other three museums combined here. [01:06:00] Because they’ve always said they have nothing in the kitty for acquisitions, they have to raise everything for every picture. On your current sculpture project, are you using your existing funds or are going out for new money for those projects?

JULIA BROWN TURRELL Going out for new money. And let’s keep the rumors going, I mean, I’m not going to comment on that. But I think museums are in a very, very difficult time right now, with the art market as it is. And as Tom said, it’s getting to be prohibitive to make major purchases for museums in this country. And I think it’s one of the largest problems facing all of us now. But one of the things that I’m trying to do in Des Moines is to really think through what can I do for that collection that will be in some way very special for that institution? It’s impossible to have a comprehensive collection now with [01:07:00] limited resources, pointless to try to repeat what

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 13 of 26 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Changing of the Guard,” 1988 every other museum in the country is doing. It’s foolish to get into a syndrome of going after certain artists to get a name of that artist in your collection, if you can’t get the best work of that artist. So, what I’m really putting a lot of my effort into is this development of the sculpture park because we have this wonderful park that the museum is located in, and we have an opportunity because of that to collect in the area of some, a very important development in the last 20 years of environmental sculpture. And have, rather than a small Serra in one of our galleries, a large- scale Serra that covers a whole huge tract of land. A Robert Irwin piece that we’ll be developing an existing rose garden into something hopefully very beautiful and very special. [01:08:00] A Bruce Naumann piece that will be above ground and below ground, and dealing with all kinds of different entrances to that piece from inside and outside the museum. So, these are some special opportunities that the Art Center has that I think are also real opportunities for the collection. And then in terms of continuing to build the collection in its interior spaces, it’s taking advantage of the particular architecture that’s there. There are three very different kinds of architectural styles and different kinds of spaces which demand a particular, you know, or will be best-served by particular choices of objects. And, also, present the opportunity for installations and commissioned works in the interior spaces, we’re working with Sol LeWitt to do a major wall drawing for the Pei Building. We recently purchased a Christian Boltanski [01:09:00] piece that we actually have the fire marshal agreeing to let us have candles inside the museum. So, it’s something I think that really has to do with moving carefully and taking time. I have a budget that is certainly not unlimited and it’s just trying to move quickly when the opportunity is there, but carefully.

CHARLES COWLES Is it larger actually than the three of us combined?

JULIA BROWN TURRELL I don’t think so.

CHARLES COWLES You’re next.

RICHARD BRETELL Well, we have a little over a million dollars a year in income to spend on pictures, so we couldn’t afford to buy your Van Gogh. However, the Dallas Museum of Art is in a sort of strange situation in which I think it owns a smaller percentage of its own permanent collection than any museum I can think of. [01:10:00] Our collection is owned by the city and several private foundations, who maintain perpetual ownership of their collections and they’re on long-term loan to the museum. And so, when you come to the Dallas Museum and you see these things that seem as if we own them, in many cases, legally, we don’t. And that’s good and bad. It’s good in the sense that there is a lot more money than our money to go to, to spend, but it’s bad in the sense that we have to follow the dictates of those foundations and the people who run them. And therefore, a large percentage of the total amount of money spent by the museum in any given year is really not the museum’s money. And it’s not, it’s a sort of unique position, I think, in America. [01:11:00] My idea, and it’s a sort of dumb idea, but it’s an idea nevertheless (laughter), is that when I went on a recent trip to the Midwest and I went to Toledo and Columbus and Chicago and Cleveland, all in a row, and I went to the museums in Kansas City. And I suddenly realized that we do have in America this sort of residual Colonialism, which is

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 14 of 26 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Changing of the Guard,” 1988 expressed in the spine, our collecting spines. We start with civilization as we all learned it in school in the Tigress and Euphrates Valley, and then it moves to Egypt and then it moves to Greece and then it moves to Rome. And then there’s the Middle Ages with the Cloister, and then you start with panel painting and frescoes. And then you go through a kind of mythical history of Western Art. And on that are sort of [01:12:00] saddle bags of Oriental Art and African Art (laughter) and Pre-Columbian Art. And I came back to Dallas and I was going through the museum and I suddenly realized that in a funny way, we could be quite easily, if we sort of thought about ourselves, a hemispheric museum. That we could, one could replace the Egyptians with the Olmecs and the Greeks with the Mayans, and the Romans with the Aztecs, and then there would be this great Colonial void, except in North America. And then one would pick up steam again in North America in the nineteenth and twentieth century. And I thought, you know, well, here we are in this fabulous hemisphere, which we understand very little, and why not make ourselves like the University of Miami Museum wants to be, which is the only other museum in America that I know wants to be a hemispheric museum, [01:13:00] a hemispheric museum. And have the saddle bags be other parts of the world. And so, that’s what we’re going to do.

CHARLES COWLES Good. (laughter)

KIRK VARNEDOE Well, I’m sure everybody shares the sort of malaise of airport art where you go from one museum to another and they all have, as Tom described, one by X, one by Y, and so on, so forth. And that is the disease I hope we are not going to succumb to. We have a certain kind of collection and our hopes for collecting in the future and adding to that are no mystery. They have to do with what we discern very strongly to be quality. It simply is that at any given moment. And that’s, I think, what they’re paying us to discern. The idea that we used to, I think, we used to be, [01:14:00] the Modern used to be, under a certain kind of obligation to report on the contemporary scene in a way that is changed by the extraordinary proliferation of galleries these days, not to mention other museums around the world, but particularly within New York City. The ability to see contemporary art in quantity is enormously increased over the last couple of decades. The pressure is therefore more on us to do something that makes sense of that scene, to collect and exhibit in a way that cuts through, selects, organizes, focuses, that has some coherent vision of what we take to be quality within that scene. And that’s no magic formula, [01:15:00] but that’s what I hope we do. I think that we are caught, and certainly as far as how I’m going to acquire. We do have very, very little funds available on an annual basis. Our trustees and generous, but in today’s market, it doesn’t amount to an enormous amount of buying power and we consecrate those funds exclusively to contemporary art. If we’re going to acquire Old Master art, we acquire it in other fashions. I mean, it’s no secret that last year in the spring in order to acquire a major Matisse sculpture, we sold two Matisses which we were not hanging in our galleries at auction in order to, what we felt, was improve the collection and to release into the world pictures which were in a sense trapped in a position where they were not going to be seen within our museum. But we’re getting throttled from, there’s [01:16:00] a double-pinch here which the Van Gogh Irises is the clear example of. And that is that it’s much less, just when we need gifts most, just when we are most dependent on generosity, the tax laws of the country make it much less advantageous for anyone to give these gifts and much less

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 15 of 26 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Changing of the Guard,” 1988 painful for them to sell them. So, the Irises which had been on long-term loan to this museum is sold instead of being given to the museum. And perhaps worst of all from our point of view is the change in the artist donation law, so that the generosity of an established artist to give a major work from his own resources, which they might be a $500,000 or $1 million painting, certain artists, of more, now he can deduct [01:17:00] the cost of the canvas and the paint. And this is not an enormous incentive. This is pushing generosity to an extreme. And if we could change those laws, there would be a much brighter sun on the horizon for collecting.

CHARLES COWLES I think we should all be aware of the fact that the tax laws have changed radically in the last five or 10 years, and they really hurt the art world considerably. The Art Dealers Association, in case you were wondering what we do among other things, we have a lobbyist in Washington, who is working on projects like this. And if any of you have any pull with any of your local politicians, or not local, your national politicians, you should make sure that they do something to favor the museums and the art world to get these restrictions removed so that artists can give paintings, so the collectors can benefit fully [01:18:00] when they give paintings, because otherwise, it’s just going to be a disaster for the future. I’ve been told...

PART 2

THOMAS KRENS [00:00:00] I look out over the next ten years and I’d try to look at what I might call the Art Museum industry. And I see costs, I see, first of all, revenue streams leveling off in part because some of the government policy that you’ve suggested. The NEA, as you know, was formed in 1965. And from 1965 through 1980, there was a pretty steady growth that I think topped out at about $180 million. I don’t know if I have all these numbers absolutely correct. But I do know that from 1980 to the present, the NEA budget has been staunchly defended, but nevertheless, it has eroded. In addition to that, part of that money has eroded. So, maybe with the federal support of the arts in 1980, it might be 50 percent less in real terms in 1988. At the same time, the tax laws have changed in other ways into essentially to, [00:01:00] not to encourage donations either of works of art, particularly of works of art to institutions. And the way that the combined effect of that, plus, leveling off of audience. I mean, leveling off in the sense that I think that there’s a certain saturation with respect to the museum population where it’s been growing over a period of time, let’s say, for the last two decades. That leveling off and all the income streams that are connected to that: membership, admissions, gifts, donations, and even sponsorship for special projects. Because to a large degree, the present administration’s emphasis on some of that slack in the federal government being taken up by the private sector, what that’s produced is a very sophisticated private sector. A private sector that I would say 20 years ago or 10 years ago was driven more by concerns of making [00:02:00] charitable donations to institutions than they are right now. Right now, it’s a little bit more shaded by a function of the advertising dollar. And advertising dollar for museums and national television is a function of the number of people that you’re able to pull through your doors. So, if you have on the one hand the leveling off of a variety of income streams, I’m not saying that the income streams of museums are taking a nosedive, but if they are in fact leveling off, and if you look at

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 16 of 26 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Changing of the Guard,” 1988 the cost side, and you just calculate the fact that every time a Van Gogh sells in public for thirty- seven or whatever it was million dollars, that every curator and every institution around the country is going to look to protect their collection when they loan these objects and then the insurance rates rise. When you look at the fact that the public is far more demanding and they’re conscious, and far more demanding than ever before of the fact that museums have a responsibility to climate control and security even though museums are almost full [00:03:00] to bursting. If you look at the fact that museums are basically engaged in this competition for dwindling funds and if there are both in the presentation, and even specialization, not to mention acquisitions, that there are greater and greater demands on the expense side. I just see a situation where I don’t think that costs, or that revenues can stay above costs for any sustainable period of time, and that is part of the federal policy. And I think that that’s part of the policy that’s harming the cultural and social, the cultural vitality and even the social fabric of the country. And I think that somehow the tone of the time has also affected institutions, museums, in a way that reflect a kind of pulling back from supporting these kinds of activities. And frankly, I think that there are some institutions that are not going to be able to survive, I think, as we’ve already seen. Institutions in New York and other places in the country are in hard times. So, if there is anything that, I would sum it up [00:04:00] by saying that while this, the title of this panel discussion is the “Changing of the Guard,” is that the guard is not finding a particularly attractive future as it moves into it. And that’s, I think that’s something for serious consideration.

CHARLES COWLES I have to interject a little comment here. If the Payson Van Gogh had been sold privately through a dealer rather than publicly at auction, we might not have had this last spiraling increase in prices. A little plug for using dealers, if you want privacy over auction houses.

JULIA BROWN TURRELL I’d just like to add to what Thomas said about all the economic concerns, a real concern for what is happening to the function of museums in our culture that they are now expected to be so many different things in a community. And social functions and, I mean, just they are really, everyone in the community expects them to be everything [00:05:00] to everybody. And I think this is also a really damaging trend. And that one of the most important functions for a museum, I think, is to be a respectful place for art and to provide an experience for people with art that is meaningful and lasting. And if that isn’t reaching hundreds of thousands of people but is something very meaningful even for one person, then that’s an important thing to do. And so, I think that all of these things that Tom was talking about are part of the same kind of pressure on museums, the economic dynamics. But, also, I think that we, as professionals, need to really continue our commitment to what our fundamental function is and try to keep our boards on track to do that and our institutions on track to really present art in a very special and meaningful way.

CHARLES COWLES Thank you. No cause you want to champion?

RICHARD BRETTELL No.

CHARLES COWLES

Kirk?

KIRK VARNEDOE No.

CHARLES COWLES Okay, great. [00:06:00] We have time for questions. And I’d like to ask you to stand up and speak clearly, and I will try to translate your question to the appropriate party. Questions? Grace, do you have a question? No question? Yes, right here.

MALE 1 Do museums over-rely on dealers to discover acquired work?

CHARLES COWLES Who are you addressing that to, anybody in particular?

MALE 1 Anybody that would like to.

CHARLES COWLES Okay.

KIRK VARNEDOE Over-rely on dealers? Well, we are, naturally, as far the younger artists go, it’s much easier to see what’s shown in galleries than it is to go up and down all the stairs and all the lofts everywhere. So, to a certain extent, there is an immediate accessibility of people who have dealers. And the dealer network is a voracious [00:07:00] searching network for any, you know, for something that they think is, there is an enormous number of dealers and they are combing the world. So that it’s easy in a certain sense to follow the gallery world and think you’re following the contemporary art world. But I know my own curators, for example, who work on this, make a point of not believing that they’re seeing the full picture in that regard. And it takes watching alternative spaces, as well, for that, and it takes acquaintances with artists. It takes watching group shows, any number of clues. There are a lot of other resources besides what appears in the Gallery Guide every week. But certainly, it’s not the case I think in the Old Master world that there’s any, you know, so-to-speak Old Master reliance on that.

CHARLES COWLES In the last two years in SoHo, we’ve had a new gallery open every week. I really wonder, in my own mind [00:08:00] I wonder where all the artists are coming from. But then as Kirk says, you have all the alternate spaces that are showing different artists. You do have, I have a dozen people a day who come to the door of the gallery and say, “Will you show my work?” Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t possibly do it. It’s amazing how many people there are out there. And any sort of network that you can get into, whether Kirk’s got his friends or his curators or whatever or all the new dealers or the alternate spaces, it’s a very difficult problem.

RICHARD BRETELL And I think we all do admit that there is art before the twentieth century, even in spite of what Kirk says about Old Masters. And that a lot of the most important works of art that have been

Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 18 of 26 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Changing of the Guard,” 1988 bought by American museums in the last 20 years have been bought through private treaty and because of knowledge and because of the work of curators and patrons rather than through the dealer system which is not saying anything bad about the dealer system, it’s just to say that the systems work simultaneously.

CHARLES COWLES Any other comments on that?

JULIA BROWN TURRELL I think it’s pretty important for museums to take the curatorial [00:09:00] role of making their own decisions and shows. And I think it’s a relationship that has to be, really worked with great prudence and care. And I think we can, museums can get into the danger of relying too much on the gallery system to do some of the work that they themselves should be doing curatorially.

CHARLES COWLES Any other questions about the future of the art world? Yes, back there.

FEMALE 1 (Question off-mike)

CHARLES COWLES Could you stand up, please?

FEMALE 1 More importantly than the sense of your dependency on dealers, in a situation where you’re likely done and donations are becoming less, what is your dependency on collectors when next week’s evening is your own museum, as the curator? And how are you dependent on them?

CHARLES COWLES Thank you. [00:10:00] Could you all hear that and understand it? Comment about how you get private collectors to give you paintings rather than give them to themselves?

THOMAS KRENS Well, I’m sorry, there’s got to be, the private collector who is associated with the museum, there’s usually, you hope that in part it’s not entirely a one-way street. It’s not that the museum is asking only and depending entirely on that collector’s taste, it’s hope that by association with the other collectors in the museum, by the curators, by being involved in the museum’s acquisition program, that collector is in response to or in dialogue with what the curators want for the museum. So that a curator’s collection and taste will be changed by his experience or her experience with being involved with the museum. Some of the great collections in museums are formed by very personal tastes on the part of the collector, but I don’t think there’s aside from an individual or private collection museum, [00:11:00] a one-person museum, I don’t think there’s any museum that lets themselves be driven solely by the taste. They in turn try to drive and change the tastes of people associated with them in the directions that they think will best serve the museum. So, it’s going back and forth all the time.

CHARLES COWLES Next?

MALE 2 I’d like to ask Rick a question. I was in Chicago last week for the wonderful Gauguin show. I’d like to ask you what plans are being made for some exchanges with the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries, so we can see more of their holdings, both their European holdings, in the respect that I’d like to see some art coming from Poland and Native Art from them, and I think exchanges with them in the United States.

RICHARD BRETELL Well, we’re at the beginning of that. And I think that as Kirk knows very well, the negotiations for the Gauguin show were [00:12:00] very important in the history of Soviet or Eastern Block and Western art exhibitions because of the fact that it was the first time that a group of works of art were loaned to an exhibition, rather than Dutch and Flemish picture from the Hermitage loaned in hostage to French pictures from the Met. That in fact that there was a sort of curatorial intelligence and that we chose the works of art that we wanted from the Gauguin collections and they were loaned, and then in turn, we are lending works of art back so that there will be a great Gauguin exhibition in the Soviet Union after the Western exhibition. Yesterday, when I was in the Ministry of Culture, the lobby was full of people from the Van Gogh Museum, from the Museum of Modern Art, from the National Gallery of London, the National Gallery in Washington, where everybody knew everybody in the lobby. And we’re all negotiating exchanges. And none of us know who we’re really negotiating with. (laughter) But I think that you’ll see it [00:13:00] a good deal more, and from other countries than the Soviet Union and from other parts of the Soviet Union than Moscow and Leningrad. And this is something that’s really important to the Soviet government, so I think that your dreams will come true.

CHARLES COWLES I think the Soviets realize the value of tourism and exchange of currency and things like that. And I think they are doing a lot. I was in Russia this summer looking around to see if there was anybody I wanted to show. They’re really trying to open up because they want to get these paintings out, they want to get them sold, they want us going in as tourists and spending our dollars there. I think we’ll see a lot in the next couple of years. There are a half a dozen galleries now in New York showing Russian art. There are several major contemporary shows being organized around the country. They’ll be a lot more. Next?

MALE 3 This will probably take a week to answer.

CHARLES COWLES No, you don’t have that much time.

MALE 3 Briefly, what changes in the tax laws would you want?

CHARLES COWLES Tom, do you want to talk to it? [00:14:00]

THOMAS KRENS

Well, I think that the situation that we had before the recent changes. I mean, I think there is a real crisis on the issue that Kirk pointed out. It’s that often at many of the very best collections of living artists’ work, of important artists, so let’s say, historically confirmed. This is just a single example. Often many of the very best collections in private hands are owned by those artists. And there’s probably not a single group that is any more aware of, let’s say, the historical relationship with a museum. I mean, number one, I would like to see in a way that perhaps for an individual artist’s own work that a special consideration be made with respect to donations to museums that allows that artist to be able to take advantage of some of the opportunities of donating that work [00:15:00] to a museum. Because, indeed, if society recognizes these objects have that value, and society imputes that value to it, why should it simply be restricted to the cost of printing and paper? You could make the same case for the gift of stock or of cash. The cost of the actual raw material or the cost of the ink to print it. I think it’s an absurd law to have. Secondly, I think that any kind of relaxation, and I think that the issue here is not to shoot for the sky. I think that there is an intelligent policy that recognizes that museums play a fairly fundamental role to society. And that somehow, if indeed there are not going to be government allocations to support the arts to the degree that we see commonly in Europe where maybe 50 to 70 to 80 percent of operating budgets for museums are paid for by the federal and state government, we’re not going to have that situation here in the United States, it seems to me that the government [00:16:00] should take a less hostile view towards museums in general in modifying those tax laws in specific ways that encourage the donation of art and money rather than inhibiting.

CHARLES COWLES Specifically, for instance, if you take, as an example, and my facts may not be exactly correct, but I think they are. Take Jasper Johns, for instance. We know that last year at auction a painting was sold for $4 million. We know that currently there’s a long waiting list for his paintings and they sell in the range of $500,000 to a million dollars. The Hirshhorn Museum just bought a Jasper Johns for $800,000. Jasper only releases a few paintings per year because he can’t afford to sell too many because he’ll just have to pay more taxes. So, Jasper sits on the paintings which creates a scarcity which drives the prices up. If he could give away a painting, if he could have given the picture to the Hirshhorn, he could have then released more pictures because he would have had a tax credit for the donation. [00:17:00] The museum would have benefitted because they didn’t have to spend the dollars, Jasper would have benefitted, because he would have had a tax credit. It’s that sort of thing. But it’s also the collectors, as the prices get higher, they can’t afford to give the paintings away any more, or the children aren’t going to let them give the paintings away. The children say, “Hey, wait a minute, that picture’s worth $4 million, I want you to sell it and give me the cash. I don’t want you to give it to the museum.” You know, in the old days when a Van Gogh was worth a couple hundred thousand dollars or $100,000 or whatever, you know, it was easy to give it away. But it’s no longer easy to give away the pictures at those prices, and particularly with prohibitive tax law. So, the tax law, it’s got to change both for the collector and for the artist.

THOMAS KRENS Can we force children to be less greedy? (laughter)

CHARLES COWLES Anybody else have any specific information on tax law that you want to put out?

MALE 4 I have another question.

CHARLES COWLES Go ahead, one more.

MALE 4 What do you think of having a national heritage tax? It could protect American works of art from leaving the country.

CHARLES COWLES I’d like to speak to that, if I may. I think that America has always had a free trade law. And I think that it’s very healthy to allow works of art [00:18:00] to come into the country without taxes and I think to let our works of art circulate around the world to enrich other nations is perfectly fine. I mean, particularly, in the contemporary art world where everybody is so prolific, there’s so much. I don’t think we’re in real danger of that. Maybe somebody else has a comment about that?

MALE 4 You answered the seminal question.

CHARLES COWLES Thank you. Another question, please. Yes, way back there.

MALE 5 In all due respect, sometimes when I go into museums, I wonder if there’s any art left in private hands. And of course, there is, but my question is this, to any of the panelists. Is there, are you finding that there’s a tendency and a willingness to give, [00:19:00] continue to give art, or is there a growing tendency not to give art and not divest themselves because of the change in the tax law or the values that you sell it at auction, but more because of an interest to keep it in private hands rather the museum’s hands or the public’s hands?

CHARLES COWLES I can speak factually on that. The Art Dealers Association has an appraisal service. And we collect a fee for appraising paintings. In the last year, there have been, there’s been such a decrease in gifts of paintings that our fees are down by three-quarters.

RICHARD BRETELL That may be the tax laws in the end.

KIRK VARNEDOE Well, it’s also true that collectors think that museums are such a good idea, they all ought to have one. So that the increasing tendency is whereas formerly, I mean, go look at what the Havemeyers did for the Met and ask where their name is on any gallery, where is the Havemeyer wing, building, memorial, this, that, [00:20:00] and the other. And then consider some other donations and other places in the country with collections that I would willingly compare in quality to that donation which triumphantly have either their own museum or their own wing.

The demands of collectors, what they expect in return now, for major donations is getting quite threatening to the whole concept of an integrated museum, of a museum that pulls all of their works together and presents them in an interesting set of juxtapositions, not as monuments to individual people, but to a history of creative activity.

CHARLES COWLES Weren’t the Havemeyer gifts given before the tax laws came in? (laughter) They gave out of generosity. Another question? I can’t see the hands because it’s so dark in here. Over there.

FEMALE 2 I’ve read that, Kirk, in some article, that you’ve said Modern Art is weird [00:21:00] and that’s sort of what got me in barbs about it. I was wondering if you could elaborate on that and if the other panelists shared the same.

KIRK VARNEDOE I think, it seems to me that’s it’s absolutely, you know, it’s astonishing on some very basic sense that at our peril we forget, that these were incredibly strange things to do. I mean, people with two eyes on one side of their head, and people who had nothing but a smile and a mustache and a lot of shattered planes. There was very little guaranty that this would ever get more than an inch beyond the artist’s fantasy. The idea that these extremely challenging non-referential things that deformed and twisted the world, that let you have very little familiarity with what you’re looking at, became a broad language understood by people who advertise, understood by designers who make products, understood by an increasingly broad public, that this really extremely weird, [00:22:00] or what, pick your word, challenging, difficult, abnormal, willfully difficult, art became a major vocabulary of expression in which countless people found personal enrichment, in which they were able to find vehicles for their own deepest feelings about life. This is a very astonishing thing that Modern Art did. And that’s what I meant, that I think one of the most interesting things about Modern Art precisely is that it has a very difficult side. That it is not familiar, that it is challenging, and it does weird things. (applause)

CHARLES COWLES Yes, right there.

FEMALE 3 As costs of running the museums dries and costs of hiring the work rises, I wonder what museums think about deaccessioning part of your collections? [00:23:00] And the kind of problems that you all see down the line for museums, is this something you want to protect again?

CHARLES COWLES Well, I’d love to ask Julia Brown to elaborate on that because she has a Goya in the collection. And the Goya, each director of the museum in the last three iterations has proposed deaccessioning the Goya because it doesn’t really fit into the collection. (Question off-mike)

JULIA BROWN TURRELL I’m going to pass on the question. (laughter)

RICHARD BRETELL We had huge fights at the Art Institute, but I can now speak in the past tense about it. I think that what, in the end we decided to do, we sold, when we sold in a certain area in the history of art when we wanted to upgrade in that area. We sold two Monets to buy two Monets, or two Renoirs to buy a Renoir, or two Matisses to buy a Matisse. And we never in the time that I was there broke that rule. Well, we tried in fact to break that rule. We tried to sell a group of minor English 18th Century portrait paintings [00:24:00] that had never been up. And we thought that we, the auction houses came and gave us these wonderful bloated estimates, and suffused with excitement, we went to our trustees and they approved it. And they went to the sale and they were mostly bought in. And so, that that effort was not wildly enthusiastic, it wasn’t a very successful one. But I think that when you do, our efforts in selling and buying in very restricted ways, we’re very successful. And I approve of them.

CHARLES COWLES Anybody else want to comment, Tom?

THOMAS KRENS Well, it’s a difficult question to make a simple statement about. I mean, I think museums get lots of works of art that come to it by gift. And there is this way of looking at the collection that to a certain extent, you might say, is a form of triage, which says that there are those objects in the collection that are really extraordinary and they’re masterpieces and there’s no way that they could be considered to be [00:25:00] touched. And I’m not sure what the middle ground is, but on the other extreme there are those works of art that are in the collection that may be suspect for their relevance to the overall collection, and identity of the institution may be questionable. They may be minor works by an artist that you have 50 masterpieces of. They may be works that don’t fit in there and for lots or reasons that I think Rick has touched on, some of them. So, what museums have to do, and if you look at that and you look also on the other side and the some of the problems that we’ve touched on about space, that if indeed your, the space problems are becoming more and more severe, if institutions like we and every other institution that I know of, is now forced to have some form of off-site storage, and that situation is only getting worse as collections get larger. What does that suggest about the [00:26:00] de-accessioning? I think the de-accessioning is not necessarily an ugly word. And I think that the point that Rick made, I think I would endorse, is that done intelligently, done intelligently by people who are professional in their field, it can only help the strengthening of the institution in a variety of ways simultaneously. So, I would say that under those conditions, as a policy, I think it’s something that museums have to look toward. I can also say that having been a director of a museum now for eight years, and of not having had the opportunity to de-accession yet a single work.

CHARLES COWLES We have time for one last question, up in back there?

FEMALE 4 Where, does the museum have to own art? Why does it have to own the art? [00:27:00] (off- mike question)

THOMAS KRENS So, then you want private collectors to own them or government, who else should own them?

Who else should own them?

FEMALE 4 Collectors, people who would like to own the work.

CHARLES COWLES But they may, no, no, no. Most collectors are very difficult to borrow from. And one of the reasons, I mean, other than having an educational institution where the collections are on view to be seen by the public and to help educate the public, etc. One of the reasons to have a collection is that so you have some ships. When somebody is organizing a Gauguin show, you say, yes, I’ll lend you my Gauguin, if you’ll lend me your Cezanne, or whatever. That is one of the reasons to own a collection.

FEMALE 4 (inaudible)

CHARLES COWLES This debate could go on forever. We have one last question right over here. [00:28:00] (applause)

JULIA BROWN TURRELL This guy with the red tie.

CHARLES COWLES With the red tie right over here.

MALE 6 I was wondering, relating to the tax problem, it may be a good thing that tax information came up and buyers (inaudible).

CHARLES COWLES Twenty years, yeah.

MALE 6 Pay greater attention.

CHARLES COWLES Thank you.

MALE 6 Another thing is, Mr. Varnedoe touched on something about museums making the distinction and having to make decisions about whether to have contemporary art or make some kind of evaluation. What I find, in some museums, one in particular in New York, tends to be so close to what the situations of what the gallery is doing and what collectors are buying in relation to what the woman just said, there seems to be a lessening of distinction [00:29:00] between museums and galleries, and what the galleries are showing. And I tend to (inaudible) distinguishing or distancing themselves from (inaudible), now there’s gaps.

CHARLES COWLES You’re obviously referring to the Frick, right? (laughter) Thank you all very much. We have overstayed our time. (applause)

END OF AUDIO FILE 9009488_01_AB_9009489_01-Changing-of-the-Guard.mp3

Changing of the Guard, introduction by R. Frederick Woolworth / Thomas Krens, Julia Brown Turrell, Richard Brettell, Kirk Varnedoe, moderated by Charles Cowles, 1988/10/4. Reel-to-Reel collection. A0004. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York