I take back my endorsement, in an earlier post, of the idea that the city of Detroit should ease its financial crisis by selling art works from the collection of the Detroit Institute of the Arts. I also apologize to the many whom my words pained.
I wrote in reaction to this quote in the Times, from a spokesman for the state-appointed emergency manager Kevyn D. Orr: “It’s hard to go to a pensioner on a fixed income and say, ‘We’re going to cut 20 percent of your income or 30 percent or whatever the number is, but art is eternal.’ ”
I retract my hasty opinion for two specific reasons, and because I have a sounder grasp of the issues involved.
First, the facts: I am now persuaded that a sale of the D.I.A.’s art, besides making merely a dent in Detroit’s debt, could not conceivably bring dollar-for-dollar relief to the city’s pensioners. Further, the value of the works would stagger even today’s inflated market. Certainly, no museum could afford them. They would pass into private hands at relatively fire-sale prices.
Second, a heartfelt feeling tripped me into being heartless. A friend writes to me—“perhaps sentimentally,” but with justice—“I can’t help but feel the anger of the grandmother, the artist, the Detroit teenager just discovering art—the regular or semi-regular museum-goer who has four or five favorite paintings and is on the cusp of discovering more, who lives in Detroit (by choice or not) and now must watch them sell those three or four works off, and everything else.”
(On a side note, I enjoy visiting Detroit, I like and admire people who live there, and I love the D.I.A. A righteous impulse blocked my own proper loyalties.)
Finally, some acute attacks have shown me the indefensibility of my position. For example, from a blogger, would I “suggest that Greece sell the Parthenon to pay its crippling national debt”? The principle of cultural patrimony is indeed germane, and it should be sacred.
Still standing is my will to distance the values of art, as art, from those of art institutions, which are often inimical. The next time I advance that argument, I will try to limit the collateral damage.
Photography by Detroit Institute of Arts.
