As the battle over Detroit’s art takes a breather, it is worth pausing to  remember the Rose Museum at Brandeis which suffered a brief interregnum as the university attempted to access the value of its art collection. Now, nearly five years after the controversy, the Rose is launching five new shows on September 17th, according to Brandeis Now:

“This suite of shows draws together a number of important programmatic threads that will drive the Rose’s schedule of exhibitions in the coming years,” says Christopher Bedford, the Henry and Lois Foster Director of the Rose. Drawing heavily from the Rose’s own collection, “Imagine Machine” focuses on Warhol’s use of photography as source material — featuring images of celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor, Gianni Versace, Cheryl Tiegs and Jackie Kennedy. The exhibition examines the central role of photography in Warhol’s art and its relationship to his portrait painting and documentation of the artist’s social life.

Curated by former Rose director Joseph D. Ketner II, now curator at Emerson College in Boston, the exhibit was organized in collaboration with the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.

A New Beginning at the Rose Art Museum (Brandeis Now)

We’re a little late picking up this story. But thanks to the New York Times, we’ve seen this fascinating Geoff Edgers piece on the conflict between Eric Fischl, Bill Viola and April Gornik, on one side, who have withdrawn from a show, “Atmospheric Condistions” at Brandeis’s Rose Museum until there’s a legal agreement not to sell the museum’s art and James Rosenquist, who thinks the museum needs to be supported to protect the art:

Geoff Edgers had an excellent piece in the Boston Globe last week about the Rose Museum and Brandeis’s attempts to monetize the art holdings therein. If we bracket away the troubling asset grab that the university made against an institution with a separate budget and endowment, there are a lot of interesting questions to be explored here.

The first is to acknowledge the growth of museums around the world keen on having the best art to display, even on a temporary basis. As Edgers shows, the museum world has a found a number of ways to turn art assets into productive assets through traveling exhibitions and loans:

In the 1990s, the Whitney Museum of American Art was paid $4.4 million to provide works to the San Jose Museum of Art, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts signed a 20-year deal to provide exhibitions to an MFA branch in Nagoya, Japan, for $50 million. More recently, the High Museum in Atlanta paid $7 million to borrow works from the Louvre in Paris for a three-year period ending in 2009. […] In 2004, the MFA agreed to lend more than half its Monet collection to a for-profit Las Vegas gallery in a casino for a payment of at least $1 million. That angered members of the American Association of Museum Directors.

So it would seem the museum world has worked out its own way of monetizing its collections under the guise of museum-to-museum loans, which would seem to be the thrust of the Sotheby’s arrangement. But the story quickly veers toward a red herring:Continue Reading