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James Fenton
copyright © 2007
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Originally published
in The Guardian
12 May 2007
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They must be feeling reasonably well pleased
at the Seattle Art Museum, where a campaign to celebrate the
75th anniversary of the museum's foundation has resulted in
the donation of more than 1,000 works of art, valued at more
than $1bn. Originally, according to a report in this month's
Art Newspaper, the board had thought of encouraging a group
donation of a "mere" 75 works of art. But, says the
deputy director, Chiyo Ishikawa, "We quickly abandoned
that and decided that to do something piecemeal would be a mistake."
Hence the acquisition campaign.
The dynamics of the group donation are very
interesting. Instead of the 53 donors being asked individually
to part with something from their collections, they were encouraged
to think of themselves as "a community of collectors and
to think of our individual collecting in relation to what others
were collecting, and with an eye to giving things for the museum".
Not only would the net result of this group donation be a very
big bang indeed; it would, as it were, be a coordinated bang
- on much the same principle as a wedding present list. If X
were to give, say, his Brancusi, Y might decide that her Brancusi
(being perhaps a less interesting example of the artist's work)
might look a little shabby beside X's. The motivation would
be, perhaps, to make sure that one's own donation not only made
sense as something the museum needed, but also looked respectable
when displayed with those of rival donors. Thoughts must have
formed in Seattle minds along the lines of: "If the Joneses
are giving their best Brancusi, we should give our best Hopper."
The average value of the works of art donated
seems to have been $1m, and the average individual contribution
was about 20 works of art. But many of the objects donated must
have been worth far more than $1m - the brass version of Brancusi's
Bird in Space, the Hopper painting (a familiar image called
Chop Suey, showing two cloche-hatted women in a sun-lit restaurant),
works by the likes of Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko.
It will be extremely interesting to examine
the whole list, which must also include many items of lesser
(monetary) value, including photographs, Native American, African
and Aboriginal Australian works. A thousand objects, representing
the interests and the taste of art collectors in a particular
area of the States, probably for the most part acquired relatively
recently by their owners: what better way of documenting the
collecting patterns of the day? As far as one can tell from
the report, the emphasis is on 20th-century and contemporary
work, although some old masters are included.
No one who has anything to do with British
galleries and museums could read such a report without a certain
wistfulness. Not only was this acquisitions programme an amazing
success, but it took place at a time when the Seattle Art Museum
was expanding its buildings, having just opened a sculpture
park. There was no enforced choice between a building programme
and an acquisitions push. The two efforts went hand in hand.
This is Seattle, however, and Seattle enjoys
certain advantages not easily reproduced elsewhere. One thinks
of Microsoft and the newly established fortunes. The director
of the Seattle Art Museum, Mimi Gardner Gates, is Bill Gates's
stepmother. She is quoted as saying that "we built the
Sculpture Park and the expansion to catch the local collections
and make sure they stay in town", and one can see here
the basis of an appeal to local civic pride. People in Seattle
and nearby Portland, in my experience, are used to being the
inhabitants of somewhat remote cities, and do not need to have
it explained to them that the more they support their local
art institutions and events, the richer and more interesting
life becomes for everyone.
Not every American city could tap into that
same sense of being a success in the making - indeed, there
are some, such as Detroit, where great institutions have struggled
to keep up. But, generally speaking, the museums and galleries
of the States have had one great advantage that could easily
be emulated in Britain, and for which there has been a long
and so far fruitless campaign - namely, that donors are able
to offset donations to charitable institutions against tax.
In Britain, this privilege is reserved for
the dead: one can arrange for a work of art to be left to the
nation, and one can express the wish that it should go to a
particular institution, in lieu of tax, on one's death. What
one cannot do is make a similar deal during one's life. But
the language in which the Art Newspaper report is couched gives
a clear indication of what is happening in Seattle and such
places: some objects are described as "promised gifts",
or as "partial promised gifts". These promises have
a legal meaning, and reflect forward tax planning of the donors.
If you take the view that what this means is
that the American taxpayer is the philanthropist in Seattle,
and that the donors are merely enjoying one of the many privileges
of the rich, then you may indeed be against extending the system
to this country. But if you take that view, you ought also,
in my opinion, to be prepared to explain how you would fund
the expansion and the acquisition programmes of our museums
and galleries. I have every sympathy with the old-fashioned
view that the state should pay - as long as the state actually
does pay (as the Spanish state pays for the acquisitions of
the Prado). But if the state takes the "can't pay, won't
pay" line, then something else has to be thought up. It's
not very honest to reject the American system without coming
up with an alternative: to expect our institutions to "eat
the air, promise-crammed".
As things stand, when a British institution
has a fundraising arm in the States, an "American Friends"
founded under American charitable law, then an American taxpayer
can offset donations to a British institution against tax, because
what he is giving to is an American charity (which then hands
the money over to the British institution). But a British taxpayer
cannot do this. He has to die first. And this business of dying
first is - how shall I put this? - a disincentive.
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