Perhaps we should examine the grossly perverted values that led to this Gross “crisis”. For over five generations, the Movers and Quakers who have run Philly’s cultural life into the ground, no one, BIG or small, peeped about the hidden scandal that as few as 500 people a year had contemplated “the greatest painting ever made in Philadelphia.” And that’s not vetting those gross numbers for “dupes”, which is to say those Jeff workers who walked by it every day, semi-comatose to its putative value.
But those aren’t the kind of “dupes” I want to discuss. When I was Gilbert Seldes’ gofer for the then new Annenberg School in 1959, I was shocked by the cravenness of Penn officialdom vis a vis their donor, Walter. I had noted, growing up in Detroit, that Money Talks. But I had to wait until Penn hired me to learn that BIG MONEY SHUTS EVERYBODY UP. And the sycophantic way they unsuccessfully trolled Walter to get him to leave his art collection to PMA still fills me with disgust.
I had been taught that art cultivated you. Refined you, so to speak.And unrefined or not, we need to refind the USA from these False Profiteers. Culture Vultures All I have seen in this gross affair has been the Grossest Hustle. Even Professor Zaller, whose every trope I usually grope, descemds to a certain snootiness about Ozark Robber Baronesses.(Before he dismisses Arkansas a Cultural Swamp, he should look at the architecture that earned the late E.Fay Jones of Fayetteville an AIA Gold Medal.) He describes the Walmart heiress as an airhead “who proposes to decamp with it to Arkansas to delight the local booboisie.” “Miss Moneybags” just wants it. Shame on the BSR’s strongest intellectual heavyweight for going so fecklessly “ad hominem.”.
And now the many honored Gresham Riley, a professor of philosophy no less, specializing in his final days with the problem of evil, makes fancy sillygisms over the differences between saving the Gross from Ozarks bandits and moving the Barnes closer to the people that Dr.Barnes wanted to educate. Man, this whole affair is bringing out of the worst in all of us.
Zaller succinctly summarizes the fancy financial shenanigans the Parthenon Pretties have devised to “steal” the good Argyrol Doc’s estimated $30 billion trove.He comvincingly convicts them of Lies, Conspiracy,Defamation and Fraud. Wouldn’t their planned swindle give the PP’s a quick leg up on their $500 million Frank O. Gehry Fantasy. Their penniless FOG lifts!
Through all this murkiness, Stephan Salisbury, cultural reporter for the Inquirer, has shone a clear light on its myriad messy details. When Steve Wynn “folded his bad hand” to strip the Old Curtis Building of its “Dream Garden” mosaic marvel, then Mayor Ed Rendell quickly made it our first certified “historic object”. There was talk of a register of historic objects. A group met to discuss this in 2005 but never met again. Mayor Street just flexed his oral muscles over legislation to keep us from other Gross surprises.
I still remember vividly the joy of my Beaver colleague Benton Spruance when the 1% rule of the Redevelopment Authority in 1959 enabled him to grace the chapel of the City Detention Center with a mural. Salisbury reports that many of those RDA works of art have been moved, damaged, or disappeared. Sandy Calder devised a set of giant banners for the Centre Square’s interior atrium which disappeared fifteen or twenty years ago. They were feared lost.
Luckily they have been discovered in storage, and Susan Davis, head of the RDA art program, is searching for a suitable site for them. There are 450 RDA works and over 300 other works financed by an analogous City program.The city owns about a thousand works of sculpture, according to Margot Berg, director of that city art program. There are 2,830 paintings in the city’s collection, if you count all the mayoral and aldermanic portraits, not all of which are at either an Eakins or vendible level! Penn has a slew of art, and President Amy Gutmann is busy devising a new deaccessions program to retrieve “abandoned” minorpieces and find them a safe museological home. (Inquirer, 12/19/2006)
In short, the Gross brouhaha has forced us to confront the irresponsible ways we’ve been trashing our art heritage since the idealism of the Dilworth era cooled. The gross finagling around the Barness exhumation (Orphans Court, indeed!) and the quick fix of the Gross selloff should force us to call a moratorium on all Art Moves until we have a long range plan to protect what we have-- before we start multiplying museums on the Parkway like lusty rabbits.
The troubles that face Philly have little to do with art: it’s repairing broken families, getting ordinary kids to finish school, and paying the poorest Phillies enough steady income to keep them moving on up. The Museum Boom (I call it the Ka-Boom) is greatest illusion the PP’s of this world have inflicted on a comatose citizenry. All the Gehry on earth won’t help a bit if young people fear they’ll be killed on the way to school. The obscenely inflated art market is the flip side of the absurdity of paying CEO 500 times what their workers get. They’ve got to do something with their indecently indiscretionary surpluses. They fool themselves into believe they’re “finally” civilized themselves by chasing aesthetic rainbows.
Losing an Eakins is not nearly as devastating as losing one’s soul. The tsunami of Crocodile Tears over the “The Gross Clinic” is a Krock, plain and simple. That our cultural leaders can’t see this is a true index of how far we’ve fallen.
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