I recently saw the 2009 documentary film The Art of the Steal, which chronicles the legal and ethical controversies surrounding the Barnes Foundation collection of art. Though the Barnes collection contains no artifacts of underwater cultural heritage, its story raises issues relevant to many cultural heritage disputes.
The Barnes collection was created by Dr. Albert C. Barnes, a pharmaceutical tycoon who amassed a collection of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings, including works by Paul Gauguin, Edouard Manet, Henri Matisse, and Vincent van Gogh. Barnes’ will stipulated that the collection could not be sold, loaned, or moved, and that it could only be viewed by the public two days per week at Barnes’ home and gallery in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania. During the rest of the week, the collection was only to be made accessible to students of art. In the 1980s, following the death of Barnes’ only appointed President of the Foundation, Richard Glanton assumed control of the organization and launched an initiative to raise funds to repair the collection’s storage and exhibit facilities. Glanton first proposed deaccessioning and selling some of the collection’s objects to raise funds for these repairs, a plan that was discarded following widespread outcry from the museum and arts communities. In 1992, Glanton instead launched a worldwide tour of the collection, which proved to be wildly popular and profitable, though it defied Barnes’ wishes. In the 2000s, a plan was launched to move the collection from its historic building in Lower Merion to a new building in Philadelphia. Critics of this plan have accused the custodians of the Barnes collection of disregarding Barnes’ wishes and the public trust in favor of a scheme to attract tourist dollars to Philadelphia. The film’s commentators connect this move to a commercialization of the Barnes collection that began with its 1992 world tour. One interviewee calls the planned move an effort to create a “McBarnes” collection. Another calls the new Barnes museum a “Disneyland of paintings.”
At the core of this debate over the Barnes collection is the push-and-pull relationship between the desire to make collections democratic, allowing the public to learn from them, and the fear of “selling out” and losing authenticity. For underwater cultural heritage sites and their associated artifacts, this debate can be seen in the arguments between salvors and archaeologists over what should be done with underwater cultural heritage sites and artifacts. Salvors accuse archaeologists and museums of hoarding artifacts and keeping them from public view while they (salvors) bring salvaged collections to the public through blockbuster exhibitions and artifact sales. Archaeologists accuse salvors of commercializing and undermining the historic value of cultural heritage sites, creating a public that assigns economic value to artifacts instead of cultural value, but not-for-profit archaeologists often don’t have the financial resources to create traveling exhibitions and bring collections to the public in the way that salvors do.
On both sides of the Barnes debate and the underwater cultural heritage debate, the stakes – financial, legal, ethical, and emotional – are high, and the likelihood of finding a single, mutually satisfying solution is slim. However, those who support the preservation of cultural heritage, whether it be a Renoir painting or a ballast stone, can only benefit by seeing analogous controversies and crossing genre lines to find sympathetic communities. In other words, opponents of salvage and opponents of dividing art museum collections can find their larger arguments strengthened by recognizing each other as part of a larger campaign to preserve culture. To put it even more succinctly, neither debate exists in a vacuum.
However, the proponents of moving the Barnes collection to Philadelphia and supporters of commercial salvage make a valuable point in their desire to see collections accessible to the public, though the ways in which they attempt to execute this desire may be ethically or legally flawed. It is my opinion that preservationists can most effectively counter commercialization by banding together and by incorporating democratization of heritage in their efforts to preserve it. Doing this while finding a balance between democratization and commercialization, however, is where the real challenge lies.
Image from The Art of the Steal.
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