Renting art for profit

Not a big deal in the trade (think of that brief vogue several years back for Hollywood films to use real, high-end art on the set), but now it's the Boston Museum of Fine Arts getting in on the action:

Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) has leased 21 of its 36 Monet paintings, including depictions of Rouen Cathedral, waterlilies, and haystacks, to the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Arts, located inside the Bellagio casino and hotel complex in Las Vegas. The gallery is a for-profit exhibition space run by Paperball, a division of the New York-based art dealers PaceWildenstein. . .

Paperball or its parent PaceWildenstein guarantees a minimum return that Newsweek reports as $1 million for the Monet show, but MFA director Malcolm Rogers told The Art Newspaper, “The figure is entirely speculative.”

By renting art to a commercial enterprise, the MFA may have contravened the Association of Art Museum Directors’s (AAMD) professional code of practice which stipulates that in “any decision about a proposed loan from the collection, the intellectual merit and educational benefits, as well as the protection of the work of art, must be the primary considerations, rather than possible financial gain.”

I'm not sure what to think about this. So many loan exhibitions at nonprofit museum venues are without any scholarly merit and of very limited educational value. Is it so different when the host institution is not nonprofit?

Mr Rogers says there is educational benefit to showing works in another city. “I saw some school parties,” he says, recalling a recent visit to Las Vegas with MFA trustees. “There is also a financial dimension,” he concedes, “and that creates a virtuous circle.”

Conflict of interest, rather. And the argument that sending art on tour is educational in itself is in its own way rather circular. From the Art Newspaper.

Posted by David on March 11, 2004 1:31 PM