Here We Go Again...

Another chapter in the let's remove art for the public good saga is taking shape, this time in San Francisco. This op-ed article by Bari Weiss in the New York Times describes a plan to not only remove a work by an important 20th Century artist, but to destroy it.

The work in question is a thirteen panel mural inside George Washington High School by the Russian-American artist, Victor Arnautoff, depicting the school's namesake in rather unconventional ways. In the panel illustrated in the op-ed piece, Washington is standing at a desk with other "Founding Fathers", his right hand pointing to a map resting on a table while his left points off into the distance where a group of American settlers impassively walk past the body of a dead Native American man. Other panels in the work depict African American slaves toiling away on Washington's plantation.

A detail of Victor Arnautoff's mural "City Life"
in the lobby of Coit Tower, San Francisco.
The conspicuous absence of the conservative
San Francisco Chronicle
on the newsstand is a clear indication of the artist's
political convictions, 

In her piece, Weiss quotes Arnautoff stating his no-holds-barred philosophy of art:

Art for art’s sake’ or art as perfume have never appealed to me... The artist is a critic of society.

Arnautoff, an avowed Communist who assisted the like-minded Diego Rivera in Mexico, was according to Weiss, one of the Bay Area's most prominent Depression era artists.

Clearly the panels in the school, as is the case for all his work as well as that of his mentor Rivera are radical, provocative and subversive. From this piece I wrote back in 2013, you can read about the controversey sparked by Rivera's "Detroit Industry" which right wing groups demanded be removed during the anti-communist McCarthy era of the fifties, and the response from the Detroit Institute of the Arts, the institution that houses the murals.

An Arnautoff work I am intimately familiar with, "City Life", painted in the Social Realist style popular in the day, graces the interior of Coit Tower which stands on the top of Telegraph Hill overlooking San Francisco Bay. Created during a time of upheaval in the labor movement of the city, "City Life" and other murals inside the tower were themselves considered subversive and protests against them forced the delay of the opening of the Tower, a monument to local firefighters, for several months.

Given today's highly charged political climate, you might assume that the controverey around Arnautoff's high school piece was triggered by conservative groups who are offended by the less than flattering portrayal of the "Father of our Country." But in fact, the move to remove and destroy the artwork comes from the San Francisco School Board. Schools they feel, need to be safe spaces for students and believe that the depiction of dead Indians and black slaves in the school halls, no matter the context, historical accuracy and significance of the art, is a clear violation of what it means to be a safe space.

Weiss in her piece claims that the Board has been swayed by a group called "Reflection and Action Working Group", in her words, "a committee of activists, students, artists and others put together last year by the district." According to the group, Arnautoff 's work:

glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, (and) oppression... The art does not reflect social justice... (and it) is not student-centered if it’s focused on the legacy of artists, rather than the experience of the students.

Wow.

Clearly the point of Arnautoff 's work is completely lost on this group. The only ratioinale I can see in this statement is summed up by that last phrase which implies that the "legacy" of the artist, (who happens to be a dead white guy), and in fact, history itself, is not as valid as the "experience"of the students, who presumably are racially and ethnically diverse. Never mind that the vast majority of the school's students are themselves opposed to the removal of the artwork.

What's even more disturbing is the insistence of the board that the work be painted over and effectively destroyed rather than being merely covered up, lest someone in the future decide to uncover them, in defiance of the infinite wisdom of the Board's decree which, if I'm reading it correctly, should be law for the ages, so shall it be written, so shall it be done.

Even beyond that nonsense is the fact that the people objecting to the destruction of these murals, are being labeled as racists by the would-be whitewashers of art and history.

This stuff of course is not new. Thirty years ago a WPA mural was removed from a school that neighbored my elementary school in Oak Park, Illinois. In the lobby of that school was a mural depicting a map of the world containing images of people who inhabited each of the continents. The people depicted in much of the painting were wearing contemporary (for the time) clothing, while in the Africa portion, the people were depicted wearing loin cloths and other accessories many felt enforced stereotypes of the "savage native". Then just this year, two more WPA paintings were removed from schools in the same community because detractors felt they did not reflect the current diversity of the schools.

While I'm not in agreement with the all-out removal of these works, I do get it. However I believe that dated as they are, these works of art, when put into their the proper context, (just like the Confederate monuments that have been in the news recently), serve as useful windows to the past. Simply taking down and mothballing them to obfuscate the less admirable features of our history in order to avoid offending people, serves no worthwhile purpose at all, in my opinion.

But the Arnautoff work is different. That artist clearly had a "progressive" agenda and the idea that his work glorified slavery, genocide, colonization, and everything else that is bad in the world, simply could not be more wrong. A school's job is first and foremost to educate its students. It is important that students know, not only history and the evils of the past, but that even during a bygone era such as the1930s, there were many people including artists, who went against the grain and did not buy into slavery, genocide, colonialism and other evils that were very much alive in their day and continue into our own.

Erasing a work of art because we don't agree with the message it conveys is bad enough, but erasing a work of art because we don't bother to understand the message is beyond explanation. It is misguided, stupid and above all an affront to education, knowledge, and understanding.

I just wrote about the importance of learning from history and the trouble that arises when we are ignorant of it. It seems at least in this case, the San Francisco School Board is fast becoming the champion of ignorance.

This one simply boggles the mind.

Getting into the act

Just when you thought the Vivian Maier saga couldn't get any wackier, a Virginia lawyer jumped into the fray and has begun legal action that might put at least a temporary halt to the production and sale of prints made from the late Chicago photographer's vast archive of negatives left behind after her death in 2009. As you may recall, several lots of items in lockers containing the life's work of Vivian Maier went up for auction after Miss Maier no longer could afford to pay the storage fees. Her work ended up in the hands of complete strangers including a former real estate agent by the name of John Maloof. Maloof like most of the world, was unaware of Maier when he purchased a large portion of her possessions in 2007. After deep-sixing his haul for a couple of years, Maloof returned to it in 2009 when he Googled the name Vivian Maier and discovered that she had died only a few weeks earlier. Soon he began scanning the negatives in his possession and posted the images on a blog titled: "Vivian Maier - Her Undiscovered Work."

I stumbled across his blog not long after Maloof first put it up as my post from 2009 testifies. Like so many others, I was blown away by the pictures that Maloof uncovered. Spanning five decades, Miss Maier's work, a combination very well seen street photographs. and compelling self-portraits, quickly became the talk of the art world. In 2011 the Chicago Cultural Center mounted a show called "Finding Vivian Maier: Chicago Street Photographer."

My own Vivian Maier bubble was burst by that show. Maier's talent and commitment certainly came through but it had to compete with the show's obsessive fascination with her profession as nanny and her eccentric personality. Along with the photographs on the wall, were cases displaying Miss Maier's belongings: in addition to the expected photographic gear were items of clothing, hats, shoes, and other personal items, which to me anyway had very little to do with her work.  Almost as troubling were the photographs on the wall, the vast majority of them were posthumous prints made in a style that bore little resemblance to the handful of vintage prints on display made by the photographer in the fifties.

This last part is important as I mentioned in my earlier post on Miss Maier, because vintage prints are the key to how an artist sees her work, while posthumous prints, in this case made from negatives some of which which Maier never laid eyes upon, represent the sensibilities of others.

Clearly I thought, the Vivian Maier we were seeing in the exhibition was as much the creation of a legend as it was an honest exploration into the work of a talented artist. That legend has grown exponentially in the subsequent years and Miss Maier has achieved in the words of cultural historian Pamela Bannos, the status of a "cult figure."

Alternate versions of Vivian Maier's life have emerged depending on whose collection you look at.

One might think that the folks who bought all the photographer's earthly possessions, the keepers of the Maier legacy if you will, would pool their resources in order to form a clearer picture of Miss Maier's life. Unfortunately that has not been the case. Each collector seems to hold on to his own piece of turf and we are left with a fragmented picture of a complicated person's life.

As you may expect, there is an economic force driving the Viaian Maier industry. Modern prints are being made in limited editions from Miss Maier's negatives and selling in the two to four thousand dollar range per print. Vintage prints are going for ten thousand dollars and up. With several thousand vintage prints and over one hundred thousand negatives in the hands of collectors in a very favorable market, you can imagine there is some very good money to be made.

I made the point in my previous post that there is nothing illegal about this. Miss Maier had no will and made no provisions for her possessions including her art work. The collectors bought Vivian Maier's work fair and square, yet there is something unsettling about the fact that while Miss Maier was living her last years in destitution, having a roof over her head only through the generosity of some of the children she took care of as a nanny many years earlier, complete strangers were buying up her life's work and upon her death set into motion the process of making a fortune off of it.

Enter from stage left, a knight in shining armor, the true defender of  Vivian Meier's legacy, in his eyes at least, a commercial photographer turned lawyer practicing in Orange, Virginia named David C. Deal. Troubled by perfect strangers cashing in on Miss Maier, Mr. Deal took it upon himself to hire genealogists to track down possible Maier relatives in Europe. Now it so happens that in an attempt to remain entirely above board,  John Maloof found an heir, a first cousin once removed named Sylvain Jaussaud of France with whom Maloof worked out a monetary agreement in exchange for the rights to Miss Maier's work. Mr. Deal's genealogists found yet another cousin, a gentleman by the name of Francis Baille, a retired civil servant in the town of Gap, somewhere in northeastern France.  Deal has filed a petition in Cook County that M.Baille be declared Vivian Maier's heir. Letters have been sent to all the collectors who have profited from the reproduction of Maier's work informing them that those transactions may at some undisclosed time in the future, be subject to lawsuit.

According to this article in the New York Times, M. Baille refused to speak with the press, wisely preferring all comments to be made through his lawyer who said the following:

It’s an extraordinary situation. You can imagine what it’s like to get a telephone call about someone who died that he never knew, with this precious legacy. He is very, very surprised.

One can only imagine.

Mr. Deal claims that he is only interested in doing the right thing and would be perfectly happy to break even in the, pardon the pun, deal. I have no reason (wink wink nudge nudge) to doubt his sincerity.

What I don't understand is this: if David C. Deal is so appalled by the ethics of strangers profiting off Vivian Maier, how is it different if the rights to her work are turned over to another perfect stranger five thousand miles away who was never aware of her existence let alone her work, who just happens to be a distant relative?
,
Perhaps M. Baille actually has a keen appreciation of his distant first cousin once removed, and for her "precious legacy". Perhaps he sees something terribly unjust that people who had no idea she existed while she was alive, and most likely would not have given her the time of day if they had, are profiting from her work now that she's dead. Perhaps M. Baille will decide that to truly honor his late relative, her work, now that it has come to be known to the world, should be laid to rest beside its maker.

But I doubt it.

From his lawyer's statement, it appears that M. Baille knows he's sitting on top of a gold mine. It seems very likely that M. Baille would certainly like to tap into that gold mine, as it appears to be his legal right. If that's true, it would certainly be in his best interest to support the continued publishing of her work and the promotion of her legend. And who would be better partners in that endeavor than the people who created the market for her work and tapped into it in the first place?

So if you're one of those people who are concerned that Vivian Maier's works will become unavailable to the general public because of her new found heir and the legal actions surrounding him, I would say don't worry.

Thanks to Dave Deal, there will just be another hand or two reaching out for a piece of the action.

A tree falls in the forest

If you haven't heard of Vivian Maier by now, you simply haven't been paying attention. She's everywhere; her work has appeared in books, web sites, magazine articles, films, and gallery exhibitions. Her life and work have been featured on TV, social media and on the radio, you name it; Vivian Maier is just about the hottest artist around these days.

In case you've been living under the proverbial rock, Maier was an amateur photographer/artist in the purest sense of the term. She incessantly took pictures everywhere she went, beginning in the fifties and continuing until circumstances forced her to give up her passion sometime in the eighties. Despite the considerable volume of work she produced, estimates range between 100 and 200 thousand images, she rarely showed anyone her pictures. Many of her images in fact were never even seen by Maier herself as she left behind thousands of rolls of unprocessed film when she died in 2009.

Tempting as it might be to label Miss Maier an outsider artist, her work falls well within the established tradition of documentary or street photography as it was practiced at the time she was active. If you didn't know any better, you might confuse particular Vivian Maier pictures with the work of well established artists such as Berenice Abbott, Louis Faurer, Lisette Model, Harry Callahan, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Larry Fink, and countless others.

The back-story of Vivian Maier is almost as interesting as her pictures. I say "almost" to avoid distracting from what we should at this late date be paying attention to in the first place, the work itself. Yet "the press" seems fixated on her seemingly eccentric lifestyle, her decision not to exhibit her work, and the chosen profession that sustained Miss Maier (as she preferred to be called) and her work for many years, that of nanny. They have gone so far has to dub her quite regrettably: "Mary Poppins with a Camera."

An industry has sprung up around Vivian Maier since her death in 2009, engaged in discussing, analyzing, debating, promoting, disseminating, deconstructing and reconstructing her life and work. To be sure in case you're wondering, more than a few dollars have exchanged hands in the process.

While I have great admiration for Vivian Maier's work, some of the work of the industry whose stated intent is the promotion of Miss Maier's legacy is troublesome to me.

I first became aware of Vivian Maier and her extraordinary work in 2009 after stumbling upon this blog put together by one of the guys who discovered her pictures only two years before. According to his"official" Vivian Maier web site, John Maloof was looking for images of the Chicago neighborhood of Portage Park for a book project when he came across a box of photographs and negatives of Miss Maier's. He bought the box at an estate auction but put it aside once he and a partner didn't find any relevant images among the thousands of pictures. Maloof's attention returned to the box in 2009.

Not having a clue who the creator of the images was, he Googled the name "Vivian Maier" and came up with the photographer's obituary. It turned out she had died only a few months before; he had in fact took possession of much of her life's work while she was still alive.

Maloof began to scan the negatives and soon put together the web site, then a Flicker site. That site which chronicles much of the Maier phenomenon from Maloof's perspective can be found here.

The complete story of how Vivian Maier's work went viral is more complicated than I care to go into but in a nutshell, Maloof would eventually buy up much of Maier's earthly possessions. While there is certainly nothing illegal about legitimately buying a dead photographer's archive, then creating a myth around her in order to sell her work at exorbitant prices, I do find the practice unseemly at best, unethical at worst.  Playing up the Mary Poppins angle in the mercurial art world, the owner(s) of the Vivian Maier brand jumped at every opportunity to promote their product every step of the way. In the name of sharing her work with the world, they would process thousands of rolls of her film, select hundreds of images, then make limited editions of prints from the negatives and sell them for upwards of $2,000 apiece. This is not an unreasonable price for a high quality photographic art print but a few things must be considered:

That Miss Maier was a talent is indisputable. She knew her way around a sophisticated camera, mastering the technical aspects of focus, depth of field, and exposure, using those things to her advantage to create images of the highest professional standards. Beyond that, she had a tremendous eye, a fantastic sense of composition, and the willingness to confront her subjects directly, usually total strangers with whom she had no trepidations about approaching at close range and snapping their pictures. The pictures of hers that have come to light in the past five years are compelling images, windows into a bygone world where ladies wore gloves and hats with veils, and gentlemen wore suits and ties while strolling about the city. She had a particular interest in the poor and downtrodden, homeless people back in the days when they were considered little more than useless bums. Perhaps her most compelling images are the self-portraits, images of herself reflected in a mirror or a shadow, sheepishly placed within the context urban milieu that she loved to explore. Cynics might say that anyone shooting that much film would be able to produce a couple hundred good photographs, but that is not so. Vivian Maier had a clear vision of what she wanted in her work; there is no hit or miss quality in her photographs, she knew exactly what she was doing.

But there is more to being a photographer than taking pictures. An essential part of the art of photography is knowing what to keep and what to set aside. While it's true that photojournalists often shoot roll upon roll of film, (or today, digital files), then send them off sight unseen to their publishers who select the images they wish to use, even they had to at some point in their careers, edit their work to show to prospective employers. Miss Maier did leave behind a number of prints of her work, so we know that at some point she did in fact select what to print and what to leave behind. Those prints are what we in the biz refer to as "vintage prints", that is to say, prints made either directly by the photographer or under her supervision within a set time (say five or ten years) after the creation of the negative. Maier's vintage prints have been sent off to commercial fine art galleries where they sell for on average between the high four and the low five digits.

A photographer's vintage prints are valuable for us in that they provide a clue into how the artist saw her work as a finished piece at the time it was made. Comparing a photographer's vintage prints to her negatives is somewhat akin to comparing a painter's finished paintings to her sketchbooks. In Maier's case, she left behind hundreds of thousands of sketchbooks, but relatively few finished works.

It is interesting that in the vintage works we have, Vivian Maier cropped her prints in the darkroom, choosing to cut out bits and pieces of the image she deemed unnecessary or distracting. To crop or not to crop is the discretion of the artist and is an essential part of the process. Sometime during the fifties and sixties, it became the standard procedure among many photographers to eschew cropping altogether as the full-framed, un-cropped print was seen as somehow more pure and honest.

The folks who are making posthumous prints from Maier's negatives, have chosen to print with the more contemporary, full frame style, something Maier apparently never did. It's not unreasonable to print her negatives this way, after all no one could possibly assume to know how Maier would have cropped her own individual prints. Of course, no one could possibly know which of her negatives Maier would have chosen to print either, not to mention the infinite choices a photographer has to determine the final look of a print. So the question inevitably arises with these posthumous prints, whose work are they, Maier's or the printers'? That is precisely why you won't find the posthumous prints in the collections of fine art museums, the hand of the creator is simply too ambiguous.

Another particularly irksome issue is the fact that the owners of Maier's archive are making limited editions of these posthumous prints. In traditional printmaking processes such as woodblock printing, etching, and lithography, the matrix from which a print is made, whether it be a block of wood, a plate or a stone, is degraded slightly every time a new print is cast. The numbers of an edition actually mean something in these processes as the later prints in the edition are inevitably of a lower quality than the earlier prints. Not so with a photographic negative which if processed correctly can withstand thousands of exposures to light during the printmaking process before showing the slightest sign of degradation. The only reason to make limited editions of photographs, is to artificially inflate the value of the prints by limiting their quantity. This is a standard, well accepted practice in the art world when it comes to living photographers who have the inherent right to determine how their work is to be distributed. It is a much more questionable practice in the case of a dead artist who has no say about her work. Playing this card seems to fly in the face of the expressed idea of sharing Vivian Maier's work with the world.

So what is exactly is Vivian Maier's place in the world? The Vivian Maier industry would have us believe that they have given the us, in the words of this article in The Independent (with perhaps just a touch of irony):

one of the greatest photographic collections of the 20th century...

The article goes on to say the discovery of her work:

– led to Maier belatedly coming to the world’s attention and garnering a posthumous reputation on a par with Henri Cartier-Bresson.

In other words, hers is the work of a heretofore hidden genius, an artist who ranks up there among the great photographers of her generation, a secretive mystery woman who led a double life, nanny by day, great artist by night.

Compelling stuff to be sure but my biggest question (without any irony) to the VM industry is this: Are you serving Vivian Maier and the art of photography, or are you serving yourselves?

Full disclosure here: several friends and acquaintances of mine are a part of the Vivian Maier industry. Without exception, these folks are passionate and care deeply about the medium of photography. I have no doubt whatsoever that they sincerely believe that Miss Maier's work truly deserves the attention it is getting.

Pamela Bannos who is a photographer, cultural historian and professor at Northwestern University, is working on her own book on Maier, trying to create a balanced, nuanced view of the artist. Obviously she too believes that Maier deserves the attention. But she brings to light some troubling aspects about the way Miss Maier the person has been treated by her living handlers. Speaking about John Maloof and his recent film: Finding Vivian Maier, part of which includes scenes featuring several of Maier's personal belongings laid out for display, Bannos says this:

The way he handled this very private woman’s belongings made me feel very uncomfortable. I think that he has successfully made Vivian Maier into a cult figure and fetishizing her objects follows this model...
I don’t think the movie is a documentary about Vivian Maier at all — it is a film about John Maloof and his quest to “find” Maier. He states early on that his interest is in getting her work into museums, and then spends the bulk of the film exploring her quirky and then troublesome personality.

And what about that "troublesome personality"- should it be of any concern to us? Bannos speculates that Maier probably did at one point try to exhibit her work, as most of the prints she made herself are from her earlier period when she lived in New York. One can only speculate but perhaps early rejection soured her on the process of showing her work, but not on making it. If that is true, Maier's story is not all that unusual. There are countless people who are driven above all other things to make art of one kind or other, and few of them gain any recognition for it. Fewer still are lucky enough to support themselves entirely by making art. Even very successful artists (in terms of sales) at times need to supplement their income through teaching or other means. Others get by any way they can; unless you're like Josef Koudelka and content to lead a vagabond, hand-to-mouth existence in order to create your work, you get a regular job.

Much has been made of Vivian Maier's job as a nanny. Would so much have been made about her vocation had she been a teacher or lawyer? One can only guess, but I think the appellation:  "Hillary Clinton with a camera" doesn't quite have the same ring.

Finally there's the question about her work: is it really as good as they say it is?  There is no definitive answer to that question. Beyond everything I stated above about her work, the process of creating art is one of give and take. I think it's obvious that Vivian Maier's work was not created in a vacuum, she had to have looked at a great many pictures made by her contemporaries as her work is clearly influenced by them. By not exhibiting her work for whatever reason, she wasn't afforded the opportunity to give back, therefore her work inspired or influenced no one. If an artist such as Beethoven for example, had written exactly the music he did, however kept it all to himself during his lifetime, only to have is discovered posthumously, would he have been as great an artist? I think that question is similar to the philosophical question:  "if a tree fell in the forest with no one there to hear it, would it make a sound?"

My answer to both questions would be no.

By definition, sound is "the reception of mechanical waves of pressure and displacement, through a medium such as air and water and their perception by the brain." In other words, sound is the experience of a physical event, not the event itself. Hence if no one, (an animal with the capacity to hear that is) is present to experience and perceive the event, there is no sound. Likewise, art goes beyond the creation of work. It is a process intricately tied the world around it, not to mention what came before and what will ultimately come later. Great as Beethoven's music was, without Beethoven the teacher, Beethoven the performer, Beethoven the conductor, and Beethoven the living man, there would not have been the interaction with other musicians to guide, influence, inspire, or even piss them off as he often did. Without the living Beethoven there to directly influence Schubert and other composers of his era, the music created after him would be have been much different.Without Beethoven's direct contact with his successors, he would not have been as great an artist.

As Vivian Maier did not exhibit her work during her lifetime and participate in the give and take that is a very important part of creating art, she never realized her full potential as an artist. This does not take away anything in the slightest from her work. It is what it is, very well crafted, well seen images, some very good, some remarkable, some astounding, of a world we have lost. Miss Maier is not however a Berenice Abbot or a Cartier-Bresson, nor does she deserve to be included in their company because unlike them, whether by choice or circumstance, she and her work did not participate in the flow of concepts and ideas that moved art and the medium along as theirs did.

Perhaps it's too bad for us that Vivian Maier never realized her full potential; we'll never know how art made today would have been different if she had. We'll also never know if it was too bad for Vivian Maier that she never received the accolades during her life that she's receiving now. My guess is that she lived her life exactly as she saw fit. But that's only a guess; only she knew the answer to those questions, and she took those answers with her to the grave.

Since we don't have any of these answers, the ultimate question is this: is it right to exhibit her work at all without her permission? We could argue both sides of the issue until the end of time.

My personal feeling is this: we're all the better for having seen her work.

In the end I think the answer to the difficult question of Vivian Maier was best expressed by a short comment I found this morning on a Facebook post advertising a Vivian Maier event featuring collectors, book publishers, and printers of Miss Mayer's work, followed by a book signing. The comment, written by a woman named Michiko Kong was this:

Hardly seems fair to have a signing when the photographs are taken by Vivian.

Brush with greatness

There were two tables of guests at our wedding rehearsal dinner almost fifteen years ago. At one table sat the parents of the bride and groom and their friends. After dinner, the guests at that table, commenting on the raucous goings from across the room, lamented that they sat at the wrong table. The topic of conversation that caused the commotion at our table was this: personal encounters with celebrities. As you might expect, the most memorable events involving genuine face-to-face contact with well known people came at the beginning of our conversation. The dinner became really fun however once the big names got out of the way and we began to search our memory banks to "top" each other with what turned out to be less and less meaningful encounters with more and more obscure celebrities. Perhaps the highlight, or the nadir depending on your point of view, came when my friend and I discovered that his mother and my maternal uncle, were both high school classmates of the late comedian known as "Lonesome" George Gobel.

My wife-to-be remained silent during most of the dinner. I knew why she kept to herself; it would have ground the entire conversation to a screeching halt as her story of meeting a famous celebrity was head and shoulders above all the rest. As the dinner was coming to an end and our friends and family members couldn't scrape the bottom of the barrel any farther than poor old Lonesome George, I asked my bride to recount the tale of her most memorable celebrity encounter. Grudgingly she told of how one day she and her friend who at the time were working at an upscale Chicago restaurant, were invited to spend the evening with Jack Nicholson. With typical modesty, my wife claims that it was her friend that the movie star was interested in but I'm sure he was quite happy to spend the evening with not one, but two lovely young women. Before your imagination runs wild, the evening my wife assures me, was spent watching the French Open, and discussing philosophy and New Wave Cinema. In the end I'm happy to report, Mr. Nicholson was the perfect gentleman as he bid a fond adieu to the ladies sans shenanigans, when they told him it was time to leave.

Anyway that's my wife's story, she's sticking to it and I'm perfectly content to believe it.

It's no secret that our fascination with celebrities comes from the fact that all of us at one time or other, dreams of one day becoming famous, to have the world as they say, at our feet. Like any typical American boy, I once dreamed of being a great athlete. That dream was brought down to earth one day as I was riding my bike up Michigan Avenue and saw a large group of people gathered on the sidewalk and spilling out into the street. I had to see what was going on and it turned out the crowd was gazing intently into the window of a closed shoe store. Inside the store was Michael Jordan, presumably buying shoes. It dawned on me that living in a fish bowl as he did, was not all that it was cracked up to be. The guy couldn't even buy a pair of shoes without extreme measures taken to insure his safety and privacy. From that moment on, I no longer wanted to "be like Mike."

When I was a teenager, I set my sights upon being an artist. My other uncle, the brother of my father, was my inspiration. I first met my Uncle Jenda when he came to this country after emigrating from Czechoslovakia in early 1968. Jenda and my other relatives could not have been more different.  He had traveled extensively, and was uncompromisingly independent. He lived life exactly as he saw fit. In his case that meant residing in a cell-like one room apartment, with the bathroom down the hall. Like any artist, he wanted his work to be shown, but he refused to create work to please other people. He could not care less what others thought of him. As an adolescent, Jenda was hands down the coolest person I knew.

All these memories came flooding into my head these past few weeks as I just had my own brush with greatness, the honor and privilege of working with Czech artist Josef Koudelka. In all my years of working in the Department of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, I have met many great photographers, some of them personal heroes of mine. Koudelka is both those things to be sure, yet on a very personal level, much much more.

Koudelka has had a long, illustrious career producing works that combine a strong personal vision with a powerful sense of humanity. Unlike the cool reserve and distance of most contemporary street photography, Koudleka's photographs of people, just like the photographer, are filled with passion; they are intimate works that could only be made by a man who spent a great deal of time, and in some cases, even lived with his subjects.

Koudelka's first monumental work was a series of photographs made in the early sixties of Gypsies living in Romania and the former Czechoslovakia. The original prints from his first exhibition of that work in Prague, have been assembled together for the first time in forty years and are currently on display in Koudelka's first American retrospective exhibition currently on view at the Art Institute. The sub-title of the exhibition, Nationality Doubtful, refers to the period after the creation of the original Gypsy pictures.

It was a twist of fate that made Josef Koudelka for a very brief period a photojournalist, and for a very long time, a man without a country. Koudelka arrived in Prague on August 19th, 1968, after a trip photographing in Romania. As it so happened, on the very next day, the brief period of the experiment of "Socialism with a human face" known as the Prague Spring, came to an abrupt end as Czechoslovakia was invaded by troops of the Warsaw Pact nations under the leadership of the Soviet Union. Armed with a 35mm Exacta still camera and hundreds of feet of bulk-loaded East German movie film, Josef documented the invasion from the streets of Prague, as citizens of that city confronted Russian tanks with nothing more than their fists and their rage. His photographs, for all intents and purposes the only visual documentation we have of that tragic event, (which from a distance, I can still remember almost as if it happened yesterday), show the emboldened public demonstratively expressing their outrage, as well as the perplexed faces of the soldiers, few of them over twenty, who were told by their superiors that they would be welcomed into the city as liberating heroes. Placing himself in harm's way, Koudelka was as much a part of the citizen's revolt as a documenter of it. Not only did he shoot pictures of unarmed individuals on top of Russian tanks, but at times he too was on top of those tanks as some of his pictures testify.

Koudelka spent the weeks after the invasion processing his film and printing the negatives. The prints were smuggled out of the country and fell into the hands of the Magnum photo agency. They were published shortly thereafter, first in the London Sunday Times magazine, then all over the world under the credit line of "P.P." (Prague Photographer). Koudelka high-tailed it out of Czechoslovakia in 1970 by seeking a three month work visa, then applying for political asylum in England. He would not return to his home country until the Velvet Revolution, some twenty years later, when he would finally claim authorship of the invasion photographs.

During his years in exile and continuing to this day, Koudelka has traveled the world making pictures. For much of his career, his was a hand-to-mouth existence, relying on grants and the kindness of strangers (and friends) to keep him going. He once said:

For 17 years I never paid any rent. Even the Gypsies were sorry for me because they thought I was poorer than them. At night they were in their caravans and I was the guy who was sleeping outside beneath the sky.

It has been a peripatetic existence as well. Koudelka by his own admission never stays in one place very long:

I never stay in one country more than three months. Why? Because I was interested in seeing, and if I stay longer I become blind.

Perhaps Koudelka's most evocative and poetic work was produced between 1968 and 1987, culminating in a book appropriately titled Exiles. The book opens with the photographer's most iconic image, a view up a deserted Wenseslaus Square (Vaclavske Namesti) in Prague moments before the invasion. A watch on a borrowed wrist in the foreground marks for eternity the time, (12:22PM) of the impending doom.

The late playwright Vaclav Havel described the period in Czechoslovakia between the invasion and the Velvet Revolution and his own ascendance to the presidency of his country, as a time of great inertia. It was as if the wristwatch in Koudelka's picture stopped functioning at that very moment, and time had stood still.

Unlike his native country, Joseph Koudelka was just getting started in 1968. The pictures from his wandering years found in Exiles are drastically different from his earlier work. No longer were his images exclusively of people. Instead, found objects, discarded little fragments of things that once meant something to someone began to populate his pictures. One picture is of an impromptu meal of Josef's, spread over a copy of the International Herald Tribune. When he did photograph people, rather confronting his subjects head on as in the Gypsy photographs, Koudelka began photographing people from the side or behind. One memorable picture is of a man from behind, as he looks toward a massive hovercraft in the background. Another, an ambiguous photo of several older men in a bunker-like structure, also seen from behind, suggests that these are pictures of wanderers who like himself were in search of something. Perhaps that something is profound. Or perhaps they're just looking for a place to take a pee; life is funny that way.

Death is a recurring theme in Koudelka's work. In one picture, a dead raven is strung up on a clothesline. In a heartbreaking image, a young woman is laid to rest as the lid is placed over her coffin while her grieving mother and family wail in the background. In a most peculiar picture, one that did not make the cut in our exhibit, we are in a room which appears to be a preparation room for a mortuary. An elderly man with sunken eyes reclines on a gurney, looking over at a bier with flowers strewn upon it. In the photo the man appears to be awaiting his turn on the bier.

For the past few decades, Koudelka has almost entirely excluded people form his pictures. Instead, photographing with a panoramic format camera, he has been documenting the hand of man on the landscape. Barriers and borders abound in these pictures. One project represented in book form in the exhibition, depicts the wall in Jerusalem that was built to separate the Palestinian and Jewish communities in that divided city. From his last words in the Art Institute produced video below shot by my friend Bill Foster, you can tell exactly where his sentiments lie.




His most recent work centers around the ruins of ancient civilizations scattered throughout Europe and the Middle East.

Had he only made the invasion photographs, Josef Koudelka's place in history would be secure. As the one piece of visual evidence of that event, the photographs served to bring the acts of a brutal, morally bankrupt regime to the attention of the world. It may not be an overstatement to say that the invasion and Josef's document of it, freezing the moment forever in time, helped contribute to the eventual downfall of the Soviet Union.

But in a career that has spanned well over fifty years, Koudelka has produced many distinct bodies of work, all of which hold up to the highest scrutiny. He is the consummate perfectionist, never satisfied with resting upon his laurels, constantly striving to get better and better with each new project. My guess is that if you asked him what his favorite picture is, he would reply, "the next one."

As such he is a constant source of frustration for anyone who has to work with him.

"Who has the bigger ego, the artist or the curator?" he is fond of asking whenever he is in a museum setting. The fact that he feels compelled to ask such a question should give us the answer.

Those of us who struggled for several months putting together his show at the Art Institute were not slightly taken aback when we met with Koudelka and our colleagues from the Getty Museum, the next venue for the show. Josef said: "We will make the next show even better than this one." Sensing that he had stepped on a few toes, Josef added that we all must strive to get better in everything we do, never stay the same.

If you were a film producer casting the role of the quintessential eccentric, difficult artist, Koudleka would fit as the model; it's as if he walked directly out of central casting.

The day his show opened, there was a public event featuring Koudelka, Matt Witkovsky, the curator of the exhibition, and Amanda Maddox from the Getty. Josef got the rock star treatment as the museum's Fullerton Hall was filled to the rafters, SRO with people lining the aisles and sitting on the stairs. He had the crowd eating out of his hands with his typical charm mixed with occasional irascibility. Never one to pull any punches, Josef said exactly what was on his mind, even as it often came at the expense of the two curators sitting beside him.

Had I had known of Josef Koudelka while I was in art school in the late seventies, I certainly would have liked to model my life after his. To this day part of me longs to live the life of an uncompromising artist, completely devoted to his work at the expense of everything else.

Yet as with being like Mike, that's all a fantasy. Koudelka's work consumes him; he eats, sleeps and drinks photography. Fixer flows through his veins; bus, train and plane schedules are his pacemaker. The man brags that he owns only two shirts and continues at 76 years of age to be restless at being in the same place for any period of time. More than twenty years my senior, he can run circles around me.

My life by contrast is consumed by many diverse passions. I have lived in the same city all my life and for the last 13 years, (not coincidentally, the age of my eldest child), have seldom strayed more than couple hundred miles from home. I don't exactly live in the lap of luxury but I live like a millionaire compared to Josef. Contrary to what he says about himself in the Art Institute film, I don't have a trace of his courage either. Meeting Josef Koudelka for the first time, no matter who you are, you are treated as if you have been lifetime friends. The consummate man about town, Josef can converse in several languages. I witnessed him in one conversation with people of at least four different nationalities, speak without any hesitation to each person in his or her own language.

But it was when he spoke Czech to my friend Milan from Prague, that part of my life's history flashed before my eyes. It brought back the long lost conversations of my father and his brother in a language that I cannot speak, yet still remains very much a part of me. Except for Koudelka's great fame and success, he and my late uncle are almost like two peas in a pod.

Koudelka and my friend Milan. They had just met
but you'd think they were bosom buddies.

Koudelka has certainly earned enough money to slow down in his "golden years", but that just doesn't seem to be in the cards. His daughter who lives in Paris (one of three Koudelka children scattered across the globe) joined him on this trip to the States. My colleague asked her what is was like to be Josef's daughter. "He was always working" was her terse response. After he introduced me to his daughter he added: "Imagine having an asshole like me for a father."

During our two weeks together Josef expressed a great deal of genuine interest in my own children whose pictures are prominently displayed above my desk. For a brief moment I had the feeling that my conventional life was as intriguing to him as his spartan, globetrotting, earth-shattering existence was to me.

At the end of his visit, we parted with a great bear hug, exchanging thanks and our mutual respect. Josef left for Prague or Paris or London or wherever his muse would lead him. I left to watch my son play baseball.

That last day as I left for home, it occurred to me that both of us were headed exactly where we belonged.

---

The Exhibition Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful, will run until September 14th in the Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago.

After that it will travel to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles where it will be on display from Novermber 11, 2014 until March 22, 2015.

The old ennui

That sums up a recent piece found on CNN's travel web site with the iconoclastic, attention grabbing title,  Why I Hate Museums. The article was written by James Durston who is billed as "a senior producer for CNN Travel, who has visited many of the major museums around the world."

Mr. Durston apparently sees himself as a modern day Hans Christian Andersen recounting the tale of "The Emperor's New Clothes." In his updated version, he portrays the child who is not in on the myth that museums are supposed to be good for you; he only sees them for what they truly are, a dreadful bore.

Mr. Durston's list of things he doesn't like about museums is very predictable, in case you're interested, you can read it for yourself here. These three sentences sum up the article pretty well:

Kids do seem to have a good time when pushing buttons, pulling levers and magnetizing soap bubbles (right up until they stop having a great time and turn into wailing bundles of hair and tears only a little more bored than the parents).

But where's the equivalent for adults? Why should over-16-year-olds, who still make up the significant majority of museum-goers, be subjected to stiff, dry, academia-laced presentations as if fun were a dirty word? 

Where's your joy gone, museums?

Mr. Durston believes that museums don't do a good enough job infusing life into their subjects. It's not enough for example to say such and such an object was made out of this or that in 5th Century BC Persia; you have to tell a story. In other words, you must make your exhibit exciting and above all, relevant. As the late Kurt Cobain sang in the refrain of his anthem to the apathy of his generation called Smells Like Teen Spirit:

...here we are now, entertain us.

In order to attract new visitors, museums like other institutions in this day and age of ever shrinking attention spans, are forced to balance new ideas of presenting their collections, with keeping focus on their mission. There was a time when no one batted an eye if a museum displayed an object with a label that simply listed what the object was, when it was made, and in the case of an art museum, the artist who made it. It was assumed that the visitor given that information would be able to put the object in its proper context, or short of that, would have the wherewithal to go and find that information for himself or herself. Today it's almost mandatory to write didactic labels, describing in detail the object in front of the visitor, its creator, the circumstances under which it was made, and any number of useful tidbits. There's certainly nothing wrong with a museum presenting relevant information to the viewing public. The issue I have is that it's not uncommon to see visitors spending way more time reading about the piece on a label rather than actually looking at it, which in my opinion is a tremendous wasted opportunity.

The ability to behold a special object before your very eyes is the whole point of visiting a museum. That point seems to be lost on a growing number of visitors who go to museums, like the author of the CNN piece, to check off another item on the "to do" list, rather than something done out of interest or passion. In my days as a guard in the Art Institute of Chicago, more years ago than I care to remember, the question most asked second only to "where are the bathrooms" was this: "where's the original?", particularly in front of Grant Wood's American Gothic.

Here the "s" word comes in to play. There are those who view art lovers as snobs. Frankly that view is supported by some art lovers themselves, those who see art, or history, or whatever, as rarified subjects intended for a select few, namely themselves. Those are the folks who would scoff at the poor patron standing in front of American Gothic asking where's the original. I must admit to having done my share of scoffing myself. But thinking about it, a sense of awe inevitably came over those people the moment they learned they were standing in the presence of such a famous,  iconic object, and frankly it was humbling to be able to witness that. Their understanding of the role of the museum changed right before my eyes.

I believe that many people while not particularly enjoying museums themselves, still understand their importance. They respect, and even take pride in their community's great institutions of learning, even if they never set foot in them. I touched upon that subject briefly in my recent post about the Detroit Institute of Art.

So do museums owe it to those people to be more accessible to them?

I truly don't believe they do.

While some folks might find art or history fanatics to be snobs, they're really just people following a passion. In that sense they're no more snobs than anybody else following a passion, whatever that may be.

In this blog I write about some of my passions: art, architecture, the urban environment, music, sports, my children, you name it. I seldom write about things I'm not interested in because honestly I know little or nothing about those subjects, and as such have little to offer. For example, I must admit having hardly any interest in ballet. Not that I don't have tremendous respect for dancers and choreographers and what they do; not that I don't think the world would be a much poorer place without it, it's just that ballet is not something that particularly interests me. Should you the reader care in the least about my feelings about ballet? Hardly. So what would be the point of writing a piece about how ballet could be more appealing to me, when ballet is perfectly fine just as it is without me?

In the sentences from the CNN article that I quoted above, the author notes the push button exhibits so common in children's museums, and how museums geared toward adults should take a cue from them. Well that's happening as we speak as technology enables the introduction of more and more "interactive" means to display objects in a museum. Again I have mixed feelings as you can imagine. I've spent a great deal of time in museums with children pushing buttons and pedals and turning cranks. I've noticed that the act itself of pushing those pedals, cranks and buttons becomes the object of interest, not what the exhibit is trying to demonstrate. It's the same for the adults, where a technological device becomes the focus of the exhibit instead of the object.

The irony of all this is that today's fingertip access to information of all kinds would seem to make the spoon feeding of information to visitors in a museum gallery quite unnecessary. There once was a time when museums employed a sizable staff of lecturers who would regularly give gallery talks discussing the objects on display. It used to be common to stand in a gallery and be able to catch up with a tour of the collection given by a passionate museum professional. The good lecturers, and there were many of them, would encourage a give and take with the public where observations and ideas could be exchanged. Budgetary constraints have forced museums to lay off many of these valuable people who have been replaced by recorded guides. Visitors tune into devices through headphones so only they can hear the "voice of God" so to speak, telling them what objects to look at and how to feel about them. Gone is the dialog and the lone voice in the crowd crying out: "but what about...?"

Don't get me wrong, I think technology is a wonderful thing that contributes much to our lives. But for every great innovation, something is inevitably lost. Museums have been around for a good long time and have served us well over the ages. Like libraries, which the author of the CNN piece also seems to have disdain for, they are the repository of our collective history and culture. If they are not everybody's cup of tea, well so be it.

The great baseball writer Red Smith once said of the game: "Baseball is dull only to dull minds." Obviously the same can be said about museums. I'll end with another less elegant, but just as relevant quote:

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

The DIA

The Train is a remarkable John Frankenheimer film made in 1964 based upon a true story recounted in the book, Le front de l'art by Rose Valland. The story takes place during World War II and it centers around works of art pilfered from the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris by German occupation forces who intended to send the works home to the Fatherland. Museum officials seeking to stop the larceny, enlisted the help of the French Resistance who in the end, manage to stop the train containing its precious cargo before it reached the German border, but not without appalling loss of human life. The chilling tracking shot toward the end of the movie shows unharmed crates bearing the labels, "Roualt", "Matisse", "Renoir", "Braque", "Dufy", "Degas", "Lautrec" and "Cezanne", scattered among the corpses of the people who died during the process of keeping the priceless objects in France.

This begs the question, what value can you place upon a work of art? That very question is being raised as we speak, in the Motor City.

The Detroit Institute of Arts is among a handful of this nation's most important art museums. Its collection includes the work of the usual suspects found in major Western institutions of its kind: Old Masters such as Dürer, Velazquez, Rubens and Rembrandt; Impressionists, pre, during and post, Courbet, Monet, Cezanne, and Van Gogh; Expressionists, Beckmann, Kirchner, and Kokochka, you get the idea. The DIA also has in its holdings important works from great artists who are not found everywhere such as Van Eyck and Pieter Brueghel the Elder. While the museum is especially known for its fine collection of American art, its collection is encyclopedic.

In the thirties, Edsel Ford commissioned the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, to create a cycle of frescos inspired by the city, for the museum's central court. Rivera's work, like his Rockefeller Center frescos in New York City was highly controversial at the time it was created because it openly espoused his Marxist ideals. But the capitalist Edsel, son of Henry Ford, was unmoved by the protests and defended Rivera's work titled Detroit Industry. During the anti-communist McCarthy era twenty years later, the museum put up a sign remarkable in its candor that said the following:

Rivera's politics and his publicity seeking are detestable. But let's get the record straight on what he did here. He came from Mexico to Detroit, thought our mass production industries and our technology wonderful and very exciting, painted them as one of the great achievements of the twentieth century. This came after the debunking twenties when our artists and writers found nothing worthwhile in America and worst of all in America was the Middle West. Rivera saw and painted the significance of Detroit as a world city. If we are proud of this city's achievements, we should be proud of these paintings and not lose our heads over what Rivera is doing in Mexico today. 

Today, Rivera'a work at the DIA is one of Detroit's great cultural landmarks.

The Detroit Institute of Arts is a municipally owned museum and given the current state of the city in which it resides, its financial straights should not come as much of a surprise. Recently the museum was forced to impose draconian cuts including gallery closures and layoffs of highly regarded, veteran museum professionals. If you thought things couldn't get any worse for the DIA, now come reports that the emergency manager of Detroit's finances is suggesting that parts of the museum's collection might be sold in order to help pay off the city's massive debt. Here is the story found in the Detroit Free Press.

I can see how to the uninitiated, this might seem like a good idea; selling off a few dozen paintings worth tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars apiece, could go a long way toward settling the city's multi-billion dollar debt. The museum's vaults contain about 60,000 objects, and twenty or thirty would be a mere drop in the bucket. One may ask: what's more important, keeping a city solvent, enabling it to pay essential employees such as police, firefighters, and teachers on time, or a handful of paintings down at the museum?

Now before you say to yourself: "beware, the Philistines are at the door", there are a few things to consider. A few years ago at the museum in which I work, (a comparable institution to the DIA), we faced our own financial crisis, albeit one not anywhere close to the scope of Detroit's. Yet the ax was about to fall on a good number of people who put in many years of faithful service and everyone was on edge to put it mildly. At a museum-wide meeting, someone raised the hypothetical question of selling works of art to help fund the museum's operating budget. For a moment, some considered this a tempting idea. Most of us would have gladly chosen to keep our jobs over a Monet or two.

Selling objects in a collection, known in the museum world as deaccessioning, is not an uncommon practice. Much as a gardener might thin out a garden, museums occasionally sell work to thin out bits and pieces that may be overrepresented in the collection or do not fit in with the mission of the institution. However a museum's bylaws generally stipulate that an object in the collection may only be deaccessioned if the proceeds from such a sale would go toward the accession of an object of equal or greater value to the museum. Proceeds going toward any other purpose is strictly forbidden and is in fact, unethical. As the lion's share of any museum's collection is acquired through donation, either of works themselves or the funds to purchase them, a museum that sells a part of its collection for any purpose other than bolstering the collection, even to a modest degree, violates the covenant forged with its donors. Any museum choosing this path would lose all credibility with future donors and the museum community at large.

Again, one might say while this may be true, desperate times call for desperate actions. In the words of a spokesman for Kevyn Orr, Detroit's emergency administrator, a museum's collection

is an asset of the city to a certain degree. We’ve got a responsibility under the act to rationalize that asset, to make sure we understand what’s it’s worth.

We have to look at everything on the table... as much as it would pain us to do it, and it does, I’m a great lover of art and so is Kevyn, (yet) we’ve got a responsibility to rationalize all the assets of the city and find out what the worth is and what the city holds.

It was added that the city's creditors may even force the issue of selling works of art along with other municipally owned assets. Chicago did just that when they sold former municipal holdings such as the Chicago Skyway and the control of its parking meters in order to raise revenue.

Of course the comparison of selling off a city's cultural treasures to selling roadways and parking meters is ludicrous. Even at the most basic level, it's obvious that the toll roads and parking meters in question are still with us, happily taking our hard earned money. Selling a work of art in a public institution on the other hand, would inevitably mean that the work would no longer be available to the public, as no other public institution could possibly afford to purchase the most valuable objects in the DIA's collection at current market value.

Museum professionals all across the country are responding with understandable concern about the situation in Detroit. Thomas P. Campbell, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City notes the outrage of the Detroit art community as well as

the millions of people who admire the Detroit Institute of Arts and the entire cultural community who rightly believe that art is a permanent, rather than a liquid, community asset.

Some may view the opinion of a museum director with a certain amount of disdain; they see it as the view of privilege handed down from an ivory tower.

So what is the value of a work of art in a museum?

The director of the DIA, Graham W. J. Beal, has an interesting and unexpected answer:

As far as we’re concerned... as objects held in the public trust, they actually don’t have a value. 

Simply put, a collection of art held by a public institution belongs to all of us. It is an asset to a community only insofar as it constitutes an essential part of the heart and soul of the community. A person can sell parts of his body for money, blood plasma or a kidney perhaps, but eventually he will run out of body parts. You cannot sell your heart or any other vital organ without dying. Your heart has absolutely no value to you as anything other than exactly what and where it is. What the Met is to New York, and the Art Institute is to Chicago, the DIA and its incredible collection is to its city. It is a vital part of what makes Detroit, Detroit. By selling it off bit by bit, the money managers may as well be saying: "let's give up on the idea of Detroit altogether; just pay off its debts, plow it under, and move everybody to some other place that works better."

Getting back to the movie mentioned at the top of this post, after the train carrying the art is forced to stop and the German troops riding aboard it scatter, killing innocent passengers as they depart, the officer who ordered the operation confronts the French Resistance leader who stopped him. The Frenchman Labiche (played by Burt Lancaster), from the beginning was indifferent to the works of art he was saving, his actions were driven purely out of principal. The officer (played by Paul Scofield) says this to Lebiche:

Here's your prize, Labiche. Some of the greatest paintings in the world. Does it please you, Labiche? You feel a sense of excitement at just being near them? A painting means as much to you as a string of pearls to an ape. You won by sheer luck. You stopped me without knowing what you were doing or why. You are nothing, Labiche. A lump of flesh. 

The paintings are mine. They always will be. Beauty belongs to the man who can appreciate it. They will always belong to me, or a man like me. Now, this minute, you couldn't tell me why you did what you did.

There are many folks who like the character Labiche, view art as an elitist enterprise. They feel that art is for a select few and not them, therefore they have no time or need for it. Unfortunately that view is enforced by not a select few in the art community who feel just as the German officer does, that art belongs only to a small, rarified group, namely themselves.

Hopefully the current conversation about the fate of the collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts will engage the entire community, not only the few of us directly involved in the arts. After all, people here in Chicago, even those who never set foot in the place feel justly proud of the Art Institute and the city's other cultural institutions, just as the people of Detroit are proud of theirs. Like Labiche, they may not know exactly why, but they understand the importance of those institutions just the same.

Art whether it be painting, sculpture, literature, music, photography, architecture, or whatever, tells the story of our culture, of our past, present and future. It is for and about us. The wishes of the benefactors who saw to it that their collections of art should ultimately belong to us, regardless of their motives, should be honored and respected. Once it belongs to us, like the air we breathe and the water we drink, no one should ever be able to legitimately say that culture belongs to exclusively to them.

In that vein, anyone who cares a lick about art, about the free exchange of ideas and culture, about Detroit, or about any city for that matter, should stand adamant in opposition to this dangerous precedent. The possible selling off of the collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts is tantamount to the wholesale selling off of the city of Detroit.

That would be a tragedy.