Just as the childish and risible "Freedom Fries" and "Freedom Toast" are disappearing from Congressional menus comes word that the French are perhaps still not to be trusted . . . at least not with fragile works of American Art.
Tyler Green's Modern Art Notes today links a Los Angeles Times report on the damage and destruction sustained by several Los Angeles-based artworks while they were on loan to a prominent Paris museum. Per the Times:
The world-renowned Pompidou Center of Paris, which set out in March to celebrate the work of Los Angeles artists, has accidentally destroyed two of their works — which fell from museum walls. A third piece was slightly damaged.
The incidents, all of which occurred during the March-to-July run of 'Los Angeles 1955-1985,' have experts wondering whether a major museum has ever done so much damage in the course of a single show.
The artists involved and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which owned one of the destroyed works, expressed bewilderment and a deep sense of loss.
Per Modern Art Notes: "Both were, essentially, dropped."
Compensation has been paid for one of the destroyed works, and "the Pompidou's insurers are negotiating compensation" with representatives of the LA County Museum for the other. The artists' "bewilderment and sense of loss" are, sadly, non-compensable.
Insurance costs are a major concern for art museums, particularly when putting together exhibitions with large numbers of borrowed works. The San Francisco Chronicle highlighted the issue of rising art insurance expense in a 2003 article, although it tied the problem more to concern over terrorism than to clumsy French curatorial practices:
In the past 18 months, museums' insurance rates have shot up as much as 50 percent, and in New York, where museums borrowing works from abroad have had to buy costly terrorism coverage, they've doubled. At the same time, the price of shipping art is rising, in part because of higher air freight costs and the increased demands of lenders reluctant to let their art travel at a time of global unrest.
'I think we're going to be doing fewer exhibitions,'" said Harry Parker, director of San Francisco's Fine Arts Museums, where shipping and handling costs for some shows have risen by a third.
Prohibitive insurance costs have been cited as a reason for the cancellation of some traveling exhibitions -- an unfortunate phenomenon grumpily noted on this weblog in April 2005 -- and as a factor in the recent increase (to $20.00) of the "suggested" admission price to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Requiring insurance when works travel is one risk management method available to lending institutions. Tyler Green recommends another technique in this case: don't lend works to the Pompidou.
Donn Zaretsky's Art Law Blog is also following this story, noting with others the Pompidou curator's sang froid and Gallic absence of remorse.
[Photo by fishing (Robert Radermacher), via stock.xchng.]
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