In our latest Art Dirt podcast, Rainey Knudson and Christina Rees discuss recent controversies in the museum world about where the money is coming from.
“If the Kochs want to make a $35 million donation to Glasstire, we’ll certainly consider it.”
To play the podcast, click on the orange play button below. You can also listen to it here.
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Hans Haacke did a series of artworks pointing out the corporate scumbags who sponsored large art shows. It might seem like kind of a new phenomenon, but Haacke was calling out offending donors by name throughout the 1980s. (https://culturedart.blogspot.com/2010/12/metromobiltan-haacke.html) In fact, he (and other contemporaneous protestors) perhaps changed the culture. Corporations have vastly slowed down their named giving since the 80s because, I’ll conjecture, of negative blowback. But what we see more and more of is superwealthy individuals giving, either money or art or exhibits (like Dakis Joannou’s vanity exhibit at the New Museum in 2009). The ultimate expression is a museum to house their collection. The Broad is the big current example (and notice that it’s not named after KB Homes or Sunamerica), but here in Houston, we have the Menil (also not named the Schlumberger). Hard to see how it’s different.