Exit
tion to be worth some $3 billion
— or around the same value as the
city’s pension obligations.
Perhaps due to the coincidence
of the figures, some see plundering
the DIA as an alternative to gouging pensions — which Orr notoriously listed as malleable city assets in the bankruptcy filing last
month. The white marble museum,
located in the city’s flourishing
Midtown area, is an easy target.
“What is it that we’re supposed to
care about?” asked Tim Worstall
in a recent Forbes piece supporting the sale of the collection. “A
few pieces of canvas or real lives as
they are actually lived?”
But stripping the museum’s
walls may not actually make economic sense.
“If the whole point is to maximize returns, you wouldn’t dump
$3 billion worth of art on the
market,” said Patty Gerstenblith,
director of the Center for Art, Museum and Cultural Heritage Law
at DePaul University. “It would be
against the long-term interest of
the City of Detroit, and you probably would not get top dollar.”
Not only would flooding the
art market potentially reduce the
value of the works for sale, but
offloading the art would deprive
CULTURE
HUFFINGTON
08.04.13
the city of a vital source of native revenue. In 2011, the state of
Michigan earned more than $2 billion in tourist dollars, due purely
to cultural institutions, according
to a study of government statistics
by the nonprofit advocacy group
Art Serve Michigan. Businesses
are also more likely to set up shop
in cities with compelling cultural
draws, Gerstenblith points out.
She says a fire sale is far from
What is it that we’re
supposed to care about? A few
pieces of canvas or real lives
as they are actually lived?”
the only option. One possible alternative is an agreement akin to
holding joint custody of the works
with another museum. As an example of a working “partial interest” plan, Gerstenblith points
to the Fisk University Museum
in Tennessee. Last summer, the
museum offset some of its parent institutions’ crushing debt by
selling a 50 percent stake in its
101-piece collection of Renoirs,
Picassos and Matisses — all donated by Georgia O’Keeffe — to
Crystal Bridges, the ambitious