In 1990, a group of police officers arrived at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in the middle of the night in answer to an alarm, and gained entry to the building. Unfortunately, there had been no alarm, and they weren’t exactly police officers. In short order the museum was minus 13 pieces of art, including works by Vermeer (who wasn’t all that prolific in the first place), Rembrandt and Manet. In other words, some pretty good stuff had disappeared from public view. The crime remains unsolved.
Over the weekend, while seconded to the in-laws in New Hampshire, we shot down to Boston to the ISGM, which is why I bring this up. This museum itself, because of its quirkiness, plus the theft, raises a lot of questions about art that are worth thinking about. That’s the nice thing about the off season: you get to change the subject for a while. I do realize that certain members of the VCA are heading for Kentucky in a few days, but most TOCers already have about 429 rounds on the topic, and could use a break. I’m happy to provide one.
The first question, of course, is about the robbery, because that has a certain, shall we say, glamour to it. It’s a grand scheme requiring a lot of effort and people, and the end result is that the works must disappear from view for a virtual eternity, else the jig will be up. That is, whoever ended up with the paintings can never do anything but look at them in private. There’s a certain James Bond super-villain side to this, some Dr. No or Goldfinger type with unbounded resources slobbering over the masterpieces in his secret underground lair. A more real world view is that the works were stolen by an organized crime syndicate and sold to private investors, but the concept is similar, masterpieces being slobbered over in private. It doesn’t matter if the private slobberers are Mafiosi or old-rich Middle-eastern potentates or Japanese business lords or Steve Ballmer, it’s still private slobbering. So the question arises, absent the illegality of stealing works of art from a museum: What claim does the public have, if any, on the masterpieces of world art? Does Vermeer belong to his descendants, the Dutch, the people who purchased his paintings, the museums that display his paintings, or the general public? This asks you to challenge the idea of ownership of art. And our ideas on the ownership of art should be challenged.
Let’s boil it down. Imagine you find a Navajo artifact on public land. Who is the owner of that artifact? You (the finder), the government (owner of the public land) or the Navajos (heirs and assignees of the original creator)? You all have some legitimate claim on the artifact.
Comparable situations, although more complex, arise regularly (including in the redesign of the Metropolitan Museum’s ancient Greek and Roman collection). In what we might call less enlightened times, adventurers of one sort or another swept through various countries and collected all sorts of treasures, shipping them out of their countries of origin to collectors around the world. Museums today are faced with the reality that, to all practical purposes, at least some of their works are stolen, by today’s definitions, if not necessarily the definitions of the world at the time. Perhaps the prime example of this is the British Museum’s Elgin Marbles. What claim does a country have on its heritage? Probably a fairly strong one. If people are digging up stuff in my back yard that my family put there a long time ago, you’d be hard-pressed to claim that the stuff doesn’t belong to me. Colonizers don’t get a very good rap overall. The mind boggles to believe that the literal Empress of India was England’s Queen Victoria.
So it’s hard to find a museum that doesn’t have at least some objects of dubious provenance, even if that dubiousness is only that history has changed the way we look at art ownership. Some of the provenances, on the other hand, are more suspiciousness by any measure. Stories about these works, frauds or thefts or the like, pop up regularly, and one pities the poor museum curator who must deal with them. The questions that this area of art brings up are fairly large-scale. The most interesting one is the claim that a culture has on itself, on the components that make up that culture. A culture ought to be able to some degree to own its artifacts both in fact and in underlying explanation. That is, this thingummy is our goddess and cures warts, versus a third party analysis, this thingummy represents their goddess and is believed to cure warts. One might think it all well and good to look at Bast and say she’s the patron of cats and a maternity symbol and explain how a woman who wanted children might wear an amulet with the number of kittens equaling the number of children she desired, and to separate this belief from any particular reality since the believers have all gone by the boards, but how does one look at pieces of the cross, Korans and Tibetan prayer flags? Sort of depends, I guess, on what you believe and what “they” believe. Does your opinion of smoke signals depend on whether it’s stereotyped Indians sending messages from mountain to mountain or the color of the smoke arising from the Vatican during a papal election? One enters dicey territory here, and needs to keep in mind that closely held beliefs need to be respected. The hermeneutics of religion, if you will, can be very scary intellectual territory. But all culture is not religion, and plenty of natural authority over content applies in other areas. Respect for culture in general, if not as thorny as respect for religion, is probably a good thing. So boiled down: What claim does today’s Athens have on Praxiteles?
There’s another angle to all of this, if we look at it on a contemporary basis. We are, after all, post-contemporary analysts, poco being the underlying gestalt of the VCA, and looking at the contemporary situation is akin to other modern ideas we’ve discussed in the past vis-à-vis art theory. Claims on art from a theory perspective become very interesting.
First of all, there’s pure provenance. What claim does an artist have on his or her own works that have not yet left the workshop? To what extent does a creator own a creation? It depends on definitions of creator, own, and creation. In a pure Lockean sense of property, my stuff is my stuff, and I’m entitled to the fruits of my labors. But what is my personal entitlement to the fruits of my labors if those fruits have a potential value to enlighten others beyond the fungible sense? That is, it’s one thing if I work up a crate of oranges that I can trade on the market for a crate of apples, but if I work up a painting that inspires another painting, what is that all about? Much of the argument about who owns Mickey Mouse, which ought to be out of copyright by now, revolves around how much the public owns the concept of the Mouse versus the Disney Corp owning the concept of the Mouse. Disney Corp would like to see its ownership endure in perpetuity. But as the argument goes, if such sort of perpetual ownership were possible, Walt himself would never have been able to take the public domain story of Snow White and become Walt Disney in 1937, and today you’d be able to get all the old Mouse cartoons you want at archive.org because nobody would care about them anymore. (All of this being in contrast to the Mouse as a corporate entity, and a brand, yet another complicated extension of the original argument.) The study of “public domain” is fascinating.
Once the creation leaves the workshop, it is sold presumably to someone who has some rights to the work, depending on the work. If I buy something, I could own it lock, stock and barrel. If I buy a painting or drawing, I may only own the actual work, but not the representational rights to the work. That is, I may not be able to reproduce it. Look at Hirschfeld (http://www.alhirschfeld.com/index2.html). I can easily reproduce any of his line drawings in many media and they look perfectly identical to the original, but I do not have the right to do so. Even if I owned one of his drawings, I would not necessarily own the right to sell a photograph of it. Interesting.
What I’m mostly interested in, though, is the claim the public has on art, if any, despite provenances. Is art somehow transcendent of property claims because of its special nature? In a way this is tied into cultural claims, but mostly it’s tied into the concept of, simply, what art is. If it’s a simple commodity like lima beans, then the public has no claim on it. If it’s nature is truly transcendent, the public might have very clear and important claims on it. Which would mean that the James Bond super-villains who now own the ISGM works stole not only from the ISGM but from the public weal. Their crime was not merely against the museum, but against all of us. Given the likelihood of my seeing too many Vermeers in my lifetime, I do subscribe to my personal welfare being harmed, however insignificantly, by not seeing the one once purchased by ISG. My soul, in other words, has a claim to that painting. Your soul has a similar claim. Theoretically the harms to our souls may be greater to the harm to the museum.
Which does bring up yet another interesting piece of the puzzle. ISG endowed her museum for the public with the expressed proviso that it be kept exactly as she left it. Which makes the place…unique, and brings up yet other questions about art ownership. ISG died in the ‘20s, and the art is distributed about the building by her whim, and without labels. Keeping with her wishes, no labels have been added. Further, because of the damage from natural sunlight, and the inability to install up-to-date lighting, much of the place is so curtained off you can barely see your hand in front of your face, much less the paintings. The museum is so tied to the claim of the original endowment that there are now bare spots where the stolen art was, as if it were just ripped from the frames last night. So the question arises, given the nature of many of the masterpieces in the place, which we “know” (allow me the quotes, please) could be better displayed for the sake of the viewers, and even perhaps for the sake of the art itself, is ISG’s legacy claim on the art, in fact, illegitimate? Does the museum, by following the will of the framer, so to speak, to the letter, cause damage? Would we be better off with, say, museum activism? Although this could perhaps be impossible, at least at the moment, since there are, apparently, living heirs to ISG who continue to protect her vision, however misguided that vision may or may not have been.
I am led by all of this to an analogous area, in which I’ll bet anything you would immediately and hypocritically deny everything you’ve thought so far. That is, let’s assume that you agree that an artist has claims on his or her creations, and that provenance can include some but not all rights of ownership. Is there some point where, without the consent of the artist, the creation belongs to public and not the artist or his assignees? Can you make a case that, despite not owning the publishing rights to the Hirschfeld drawings, you have a right to publish them? Or that without owning the actual drawing, you have a right to that drawing? Got your answers all written down? Good. Then change it from art as drawing to art as music. Do you have the right to perform a song written by a living composer without recompense to the composer? Do you have the right to go to a performance of music without paying for a ticket? Do you have the right to steal CDs from a music store? Do you have to right to download music for free, regardless of the source, regardless of the rights of the owners of that music, just because you can? I have seldom heard an argument in defense of stealing the property of musicians—i.e., illegal downloads—that doesn’t claim that either it’s so easy to do so that this ease is tantamount to an invitation, or that record companies are already ripping off the artists, and that not paying the record companies is somehow helping the artists. The former argument extends to any lightly policed property or easily accessible property: it is moral to steal if it’s easy to do so. The latter argument extends to any immoral act: if others do it, then it is not immoral. Good luck on either count. I mean, let’s face it. Put yourself in the position of being a musician, making a living from your work. At would point would you believe, beyond a small allowance for promotion, your stuff should be given away? Or stolen by people because they can? Something tells me, not much.
Still, ownership of art is not always so cut and dried as you getting free music that you should have paid for. At some point we, as a society, seem to believe that, after the creators are no longer around to benefit from it, their work should become owned by the public at large, i.e., in the public domain. This is, we believe, beneficial to society because it enhances the free process of culture (whatever that is). But there are sooooo many claims to art. Often you have to just pick one.
If that’s not indicative of the postcontemporary condition, I don’t know what is.
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