Comments on Brandeis Wasn't Wrong

• Let's update our knowledge about the best university museums
• Posted by ArtMuser on October 23, 2009 at 1:15pm EDT

• I too agree that Brandeis should have the option of devolving the role of the Rose Art Museum if it wishes, so long as this is done consistently with the intentions and legal restrictions of agreements with past donors--just as it ought to do if it wished to no longer have a chemistry department, for example. However, I take strong exception to the writer's perception that most university museums disdain or at least neglect broader academic engagement. The best university art museums have long sought to develop not only close ties with their colleagues in art and art history but with fields in the humanities, social sciences, and even natural sciences. More can always be done, of course, and I'd suggest that perhaps the Rose didn't do enough of this or the outcry at Brandeis would have been louder and broader than it has been, or the trustees would have known it was a bad idea. As a long-time champion of cross-disciplinarity, I have seen the fruits of many museum professionals building these ties. If this didn't happen at Northwestern during the writer's tenure, that's regrettable. But this should not inform a misguided and out of date perception that it's true elsewhere.

  Similarly, the views about owning objects strike me as pedagogically naive at best. Sustained study of works of art in the original and research on the same--which can be equally boundary crossing, and simply of interest to those pesky art historians--would be impossible if objects simply came and went for loan exhibitions.

• Next Brandeis
• Posted by Classof '73 on October 23, 2009 at 4:00pm EDT

• Brandeis Art History and Studio faculty have been involved in museum plans and activities all along. What happened at Brandeis was different. Turf battle? Scapegoating? Desperation? I'm not sure, but it was a different scenario than the one being described in this article.

• We Don't All Wear A Size 10 Shoe
• Posted by Stephen Trachtenberg , XPresident and Professor of Public Service at George Washington University on October 26, 2009 at 5:15am EDT

• We don't all wear a size 10 shoe. Why should every university share a common policy on art collections? NYU, Columbia, GW, Georgetown are all minutes from many fine art museums. They do not need their own collections. Students can see all the art they need or want at all times. With ease. This is not so at many other institutions of higher education. So perhaps they require their own collections to display. Each university should decide what it needs or wants on its own.

• Why Brandeis Was Wrong
• Posted by Alex Barker , Director, Museum of Art and Archaeology at University of Missouri on October 26, 2009 at 10:15am EDT

• Two issues are being conflated here, and their conflation increases the danger that the Brandeis debacle will be repeated elsewhere. And that should worry academics and administrators of all disciplines, because the issues aren't really about museums at all.

  Should universities be able to decide whether or not to maintain an art museum? Of course. And for some universities a permanent collection, allowing students sustained engagement with original works, may be as superfluous to their values as is any given discipline like art history. Sad, but true. Similarly the questions that a museum by its very existence explores--issues of relevance and representation, influence and equity, aesthetics and the relationships between visual and other arts--may not be fully valued by students, faculty, or by university administrators. Equally sad, but perhaps even more true. After thoughtful deliberations involving administrators, faculty, students, donors, and all of the stakeholders and communities served by the museum, such an institution might conclude that a museum is not an appropriate part of the university. In that case it's appropriate for the university to close the museum and dispose of its collections in an appropriate manner.

  That's not what's at issue here, because that's not what happened.

  By all accounts the closure wasn't the result of a deliberate, transparent and inclusive process examining the museum's intellectual value and role. It wasn't the outcome of a reasonable dialogue about where the university planned to go, and how to best accomplish its academic mission and enrich the intellectual life of its campus. It was instead an arbitrary decision made to capture the cash value of the museum's art collections in order to make up investment losses.

  Just as a university must manage a museum in accordance with applicable ethical rules and guidelines, if it makes a good-faith determination that it can no longer sustain a museum it must dispose of its collections in accordance with those same guidelines. And that generally involves consultation with individual donors and locating other institutions which could provide an appropriate home for collections, not treating its collections as a university-designated rainy-day fund.

  The debate isn't about whether Brandeis--or any other university--should be allowed to discuss debate and ultimately decide how to best accomplish its academic mission. It's about why Brandeis didn't do so.

• Brandeis' TheRose Art Museum debacle
• Posted by Dominique Nahas , Assoc. Prof. - FA and Independant Curator and Critic at Pratt Institute/Maryland Institute on October 26, 2009 at 11:15am EDT

• As an invited curator who was asked to organize an exhibition at The Rose Art Museum prior to its implosion by the administrators of Brandeis in defiance of the Museum's Board Members I must say that Alex barker's comments on the Rose Art Museum debacle are accurate and to the point. Rudolph Weingartner's comments are fine; it's just that they aren't relevant to what happened at Brandeis where bad-faith on part of the University President and his advisors, in their fiscal panic, pre-empted any possibility of putting in place a "task-force" as Weingartner puts it to ensure that all interests of the academic and the local community would be properly ensured. Contrary to Weingartner's presuppositions The Rose Art Museum had never had problems integrating the interests or the mandates of the academic departments willing or able to use the Museum's holdings or the Museum's rigorous exhibition programming as exemplary teaching devices or pedagogic platforms. Far from it. The imperial President of Brandeis's injudicious actions have poisoned the atmosphere and the reputation of that institution. He knows it and so does his staff. He is resigning and many of his key administrators/enablers have quietly left to assume other posts in other institutions, leaving future more responsible and enlightened administrators to stabilize a badly shattered institutional reputation.

• Rose Art Museum and deaccessioning
• Posted by Peter Plagens on October 26, 2009 at 11:30am EDT

• Dean Weingartner raises, and conflates, two separate issues: a) Does a college or university need an art museum, and b) Should that museum abide by the generally accepted rule that art from its collection be deaccessioned (in plain English, sold) only for funds to purchase other art?

  As to (a): Not every college or university requires an art museum. ("Museums" are distinguished from "galleries" by virtue of having their own collections.) But some do, and the pedagogic value of having a collection should be obvious: the reliable availability of works of art which can be seen and studied by students. For campus museums to be demoted to "galleries" is to rely, pedagogically, exclusively on the work in temporary exhibitions. Unless Dean Weingartner's "quite special exceptions" are improbably many, his statement that there is "a very small pedagogic function for colleges and universities to own works of art" is wrong.

  As to (b): Those colleges and universities which do have museums should abide by the generally accepted rule that they sell off art from their collections only to purchase other art. (If they could not sell art at all, their collections would be only expandable, taxing storage space, or frozen.) They should abide by this rule even if they're not members of the American Association of Museums because the rule means, essentially, that the museum has to behave ethically. Which means, in turn, that Dean Weingartner's proviso that "the provisions of deeds of gift must be scrupulously observed" doesn't require the donor of a work of art to a campus museum to draw up the equivalent of a suspicious billionaire's prenup in order to assume that the museum won't flip the work to get the money to remove mold from a chemistry lab.

  Dean Weingartner's reason for wanting most college and university museums to be demoted to "galleries" and allowing them to sell off their works of art for money to be used for whatever purposes the college or university deems necessary is "the current cost and value of so many of them. First, most works of art come into most museums via gifts, not purchases with institutional funds, so the cost of them is more or less a red herring. Second, "value" is simply the expedience of regarding a museum's collection as a capital asset, i.e., money of inconvenient liquidity. It is not; a collection is what a museum holds in trust.

  Finally, Dean Weingartner's giving his collection of prints to Northwestern University's museum is puzzling, if not (albeit generously) hypocritical. With its commuter-proximity to Chicago and that city's many museums and art galleries (not to mention the Evanston Art Center), Northwestern cannot possibly be among Dean Weingartner's "quite special exceptions" requiring the presence of a genuine art museum on campus. So why didn't he simply sell his collection and donate the proceeds to the University to use however it chooses?

• And yet I said to myself "Good for them"...
• Posted by Dominique Nahas on October 29, 2009 at 3:30pm EDT

• Dean Weingartner might want to inform himself of what "them" have done (and why) by reading the November 2009 issue of Harper's Magazine: "Voodoo Academics: Brandeis University's hard lesson in the real economy" by Christopher R. Beha.

• Weingartner's error
• Posted by Howard S. Becker , retired at none on October 30, 2009 at 9:45am EDT

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  Rudolph Weingartner’s memory betrays him when he says that campus art museums and galleries should not be regarded as “essential to the academic experience and to the entire educational enterprise,” citing his own experience at Northwestern to conclude that these “museums don’t even know how to communicate with other than art faculty on campus.” At least one exhibition at the Block Gallery of Northwestern University involved close collaboration between the then director of the gallery, Kathy Foley, and a professor, me. I was at the time Professor of Sociology at the university. When Foley arrived on campus as the first director of the gallery she systematically visited faculty in many departments of the university, certainly not just art and art history. She explained that she was interested in collaborating with faculty all across the university and wanted to know if I had any ideas for a possible exhibit.

   

   

   

  I did. I had for some years been interested in the use of photography as a research method in the social sciences (primarily sociology and anthropology) and from time to time had idly thought about putting together an exhibit of such work by both artists and social scientists, beginning with the deservedly legendary collaboration of Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Balinese Character. When I told her about my semi-serious thoughts of a show, she said, “I think that can work,” and proceeded to raise a substantial sum, which paid for the preparation of the exhibit—transporting, matting, framing, and hanging the prints—and the publication of a very handsome catalog, Exploring Society Photographically, which has become an important reference in visual social science. The exhibit included images by the great visual anthropologist John Collier, examples from the Mead/Bateson book, and work by a dozen other artists and social scientists (including Charles Berger, Douglas Harper, Euan Duff, Dona Schwartz, and others). It traveled to a number of other university and art school venues, which I think is a good marker of its quality and reception. Foley herself was imaginative, resourceful and unfailingly helpful through all the aggravation that no one can know who hasn’t themselves attempted such a thing.

   

   

   

  This experience epitomized what a university gallery can achieve in collaboration across the campus and suggests that Weingartner’s memory may not be a good guide to policy in this area.