Thursday, March 28, 2024
 

Dallas Museum of Art in Hot Water


This art law story hasn’t received very much media attention, but according to John Viramontes and Sam Blain, it definitely should.

The Dallas Museum of Art is under scrutiny. Viramontes puts it quite succinctly and on-point: “Has the not-for-profit Dallas Museum of Art instead become a SHOPPING MART to offer its art straight off the museum walls as mega-millionaire David Martinez did when he picked the Rothko and in a secret deal, purchased it for a cool $31M ?” D Magazine’s Peter Simek wonders the same thing, “the collector who purchased the Rothko from Hoffman in 2007 essentially went shopping at the DMA during the museum’s Fast Forward exhibition. Does the DMA become art mart?”

Simek asks an even more disturbing question, “What if the DMA passed up the opportunity to purchase a piece by Jeff Koons because they assumed they had one in the Rachofsky collection, but then Rachofsky sells the Koons, and now the DMA is left without one? [T]his is a hypothetical situation, but it is a much more likely one, and it presses the point that the donations may compromise the museum’s ability to curate its own contemporary collection.”

Does this exhibition-cum-shopping gesture by a nonprofit 501(c)(3) institution pass legal and ethical muster?

Sam Blain says, “it gets better than that.” According to the website ArtSeek, the worries of most art museums in shipping and handling of priceless artworks is a thing of the past for The Dallas Museum of Art. “The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has named the museum a certified cargo screening facility. The designation means the DMA doesn’t have to worry about who is handling the artwork it’s shipping out to other institutions since it will be handling the packing and screening.”

 

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  • Or the museum is discovering the problem with accepting open-ended gifts and presenting them to the public as works for the permanent collection. As Simek pointed out from my blog, I think the larger problem is at what point do nonprofit museums become shopping-malls for well-heeled collectors?

    http://theartoflaw.blogspot.com/2010/05/rothko-case-begs-questions-about-how.html

     
     
     
  • John Viramontes

    Texas art historian Sam Blain’s Facebook page develops this story further, the other day Blain posted this entry, “It’s no secret, the DMA has allowed itself to be a shipping and receiving facility for artworks coming in and going out for “special” priviledged private collector-DMFA/DMA board members, for years. That’s just another one of the DMA’s problem, the art dealing aspect of the museum in-relation to its board members who’ve decided over the years to become “private” art dealers. In the past, the DMA footed the bill for these board member dealers. That’s right, taxpayer money took care of it all via the DMA. Your tax money, hard at work.”

     
     
     
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