Whipped Cream Difficulties

Once upon a time, a man named Colonel Michael Friedsam, president of the B. Altman retail store chain, died.

The late Col. Friedsam left his extensive art collection to the Brooklyn Museum. Sounds great, doesn’t it? But there’s a catch. Actually, several catches.

Catch one: Col. Friedsam died in 1931. Over the years, the Brooklyn Museum has discovered…well…

… A quarter of the 926 works have turned out to be fakes, misattributions or of poor quality, and the museum potentially faces a hefty bill to store the 229 pieces it no longer wants.

This leads us directly to catch number two: the museum is paying to store stuff it doesn’t particularly want.

The problem of what to do with the unwanted items has arisen as the Brooklyn Museum tries to reclaim gallery space that has long been devoted to storage. When the museum accepted the Friedsam collection in the early 1930s, its sprawling Beaux-Arts building on the edge of Prospect Park had vast spaces to fill. As officials explain in their court filing, the opposite problem now plagues the museum, which at one point had as many as 1.5 million objects, some of them inauthentic, trivial or no longer in keeping with the museum’s mission — like a three battle-axes that came from Mr. Friedsam.

Of course, there are rules and standards on how museums are supposed to store art, so they can’t just shove stuff “willy-nilly into a closet”, as the NYT describes it.

So why don’t they just get rid of the stuff they don’t want? Surely, they can find a buyer, even for the fakes? I’d give them $5 for that Louis XI portrait.

Ah, but that’s catch number three: Col. Friedsam’s will requires that the museum get permission from the executors of his estate before they “deaccession” items. And the last executor died in 1962. The museum is working with the courts on this problem, but:

Noting that the will specified that the art should go to the colonel’s brother-in-law and two friends if the collection were not kept together, Judge Nora Anderson told the museum in December 2011 that it must search for these three men’s descendants before she would rule.

Left unclear in the article: why it took 80 years for the museum to figure out it was stuck with a bunch of crap. Or, alternatively, why there’s a crap crisis now.

Atlanta has this thing called “Living Walls”, which the NYT describes as “an annual gathering of street artists from around the world who paint on walls and buildings”.

Some of these paintings are in “blighted” areas; the theory seems to be that these paintings will make things look a little nicer.

But it has also prompted an outcry. Some residents have raised concerns that too much of Atlanta has become a canvas, and some find the works disturbing or offensive.

The punchline?

One mural depicting a nude woman was taken down in September after residents called it pornographic. On Tuesday, Georgia Department of Transportation workers painted over another mural — of an alligator-headed man with a serpentine tail — that neighbors said confused them and was possibly demonic.

But this had nothing to do with “artistic value”, according to the DoT: rather, they claim that the artist didn’t have the proper permits for public art. (Other “Living Walls” paintings are on private property; the NYT doesn’t make this clear, but it looks like the alligator mural was painted along the side of a road.)

And:

The mural of the woman was done by an Argentine painter, Hyuro, and the alligator painting was by a French painter, Pierre Roti. Mr. Roti, who traveled to Atlanta on his own budget and spent 11 days on the mural, said he found the reaction confusing. He intended the mural as an allegory about the brutality of capitalism, not a statement on religion or demons.

“an allegory about the brutality of capitalism”. By the way, “Living Walls” sponsors include “a prominent law firm, the Museum of Design Atlanta and the W Hotel”.

This story has gotten a fair amount of attention elsewhere, but I want to highlight one aspect of it.

Ileana Sonnabend was a noted NYC art dealer who passed away in 2007. Her children inherited her art collection, which was valued at $1 billion. So far, her heirs have paid $471 million in estate taxes on the collection, selling off a large part of it to do so.

One of the pieces in the collection is a Robert Rauschenberg piece called “Canyon”.

Because the work, a sculptural combine, includes a stuffed bald eagle, a bird under federal protection, the heirs would be committing a felony if they ever tried to sell it. So their appraisers have valued the work at zero.

The IRS values “Canyon” at $65 million, and wants the family to pay $29.2 million in tax.

“The ruling about the eagle is not something the Art Advisory Panel considered,” [Stephanie] Barron [senior curator of 20th-century art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art] said, adding that the work’s value is defined by its artistic worth. “It’s a stunning work of art and we all just cringed at the idea of saying that this had zero value. It just didn’t make any sense.”

But doesn’t the fact that the work can’t be sold make it of zero value anyway? Sort of by definition? And is Ms. Barron confusing aesthetic value with market value?

[Ralph E.] Lerner [lawyer for the heirs] said that since the children assert the Rauschenberg has no dollar value for estate purposes, they could not claim a charitable deduction by donating “Canyon” to a museum. If the I.R.S. were to prevail in its $65 million valuation, he said the heirs would still have to pay the $40.9 million in taxes and penalties regardless of a donation.