美国国家公共电台 NPR Baltimore Museum Says Goodbye Warhol, Hello Younger, More Diverse Collection

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SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

This week, a painting by Kerry James Marshall sold for more than $21 million. It is believed to be the most ever paid for the work of a living black artist. The buyer was just revealed to be Sean Combs. It's the kind of work that more museums are trying to add to their collections. But these pieces cost money, as that happens. In the same auction¹ were works by Andy Warhol and Franz Kline. We mention them because they were sold for exactly this reason - to fund acquisitions of art by women and artists of color. NPR's Andrew Limbong has more.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: And that leads us to lot no. 22, property from the Baltimore Museum of Art...

ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE²: Let's start with the Warhol auction.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: And I'll start the bidding of 2,200,000...

LIMBONG: This is from Sotheby's auction house in New York City where well-dressed people are making bids on Andy Warhol's "Oxidation Painting." It's a rust-colored splatter work made out of paint and urine. Bids go up until...

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Lady's bid - and selling - at $2,800,000. Thank you, madam.

LIMBONG: When a museum sells off pieces from their collection, there's a fancy $10 term for it - deaccession. And to do it - well, here's Christopher Bedford, the director of the Baltimore Museum of Art.

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD: It's a very, very long, attenuated³, moderately agonizing⁴ process to deaccession, and it should be.

LIMBONG: A museum selling art is a little different from, say, you selling your old iPhone for a better one. That's because when a museum obtains a piece of art, it's making a sort of compact between them and the public saying, I am buying this specifically so that you and other people in this community can come and see it. To sell is to sort of breach⁵ that compact. Museums often get in trouble for not deaccessioning the right way. For example, in Massachusetts recently, things got heated when the Berkshire Museum announced they'd be selling some pieces.

CAROL DIEHL: It's like your mother selling your heirlooms that you're supposed to get.

LIMBONG: That's Carol Diehl, a member of a campaign to save the art, talking to New England Public TV last month. The Berkshire's deaccessioning was opposed by the American Alliance of Museums and the Association of Art Museum Directors, groups that make the rules for this sort of thing. Those groups did, however, give their blessing⁶ to the Baltimore Museum of Art to sell pieces by Andy Warhol, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg and others. The idea is to make the collection better reflect the city, which is about 60 percent black.

BEDFORD: We're actually not saying, in any sense, that those white males that dominate American museum collections are an illegitimate part of history. They are absolutely a part of history.

LIMBONG: The pieces sold were stuff that was redundant⁷, not shown that often or even just kept in storage. The Baltimore museum still has plenty of Warhol's, Rauschenberg's, Kline's up on the walls. But with the money from the sale, Bedford is looking to acquire art by people of color and women going back to the '40s.

BEDFORD: I believe that we as museums have not properly represented art history as a consequence of conscious prejudice and unconscious prejudice. And it's our job now to go back and to begin to look at those artists who meet the criteria⁸ of excellence⁹ but who have been written out for various different reasons usually based on race or gender¹⁰.

MELEKO MOKGOSI: To not do this is to say that we already know everything. It's not representing the textures¹¹ and experiences and lives of those people in that community.

LIMBONG: That's Meleko Mokgosi. He's a painter who's got an exhibition up at the Baltimore Museum of Art right now that happens to be about representation of black people in art.

MOKGOSI: And the Baltimore museum is saying, no, that is not the case. We don't know everything, right? The things - the histories and the people and the cultures that are already dominant¹² in the fine arts, that's not the whole story.

LIMBONG: Baltimore Museum of Art Director Christopher Bedford says the museum plans on announcing what pieces they're buying with this new money at the end of the month. Andrew Limbong, NPR News.

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