The Missing Mainstream Media

Who's holding Glenn Lowry's feet to the fire?

by Beth E. Wilson, February 27, 2007

In case you missed it, there's a new scandal in the artworld. The New York Times broke the story, about two weeks ago, that the director of the Museum of Modern Art, Glenn Lowry, was paid an enormous sum of money, above and beyond his publicly released salary, by a tax-exempt foundation—one that was set up by several members of MoMA's board, namely: Agnes Gund, Ronald Lauder, and David and Laurance Rockefeller. (According to MoMA's public filings, Lowry was paid $1.28 million in the year ending June 2005; the trust paid him an additional $5.35 million between 1995 and 2003.) The NYT story is now on pay-per-view...click here for a good summary of the story.

This is extremely troubling news. The MoMA trustees involved claim that it would be impossible to attract management of Lowry's caliber without padding the compensation package. ($1.28 million a year isn't enough to attract somebody who loves art and has management skills? Seriously, most of us work for peanuts in this biz....) And that's not even to raise the inconvenient question of just how good Lowry's job performance has been, what with the gigantic new MoMA raising the admission fee ante to $20 a pop, then discovering that the big new mall—er, museum building—that they built still doesn't offer enough exhibition space for MoMA's permanent collection. But I digress.

The director of a museum needs to manage his/her board, taking their counsel as it supports the mission of the institution, cultivating their financial and other support of the museum, but—and this is key—remaining independent as the day-to-day manager of the place. When a small clutch of trustees takes it upon itself to fund a specialized, tax-exempt trust fund (Hello, Attorney General's office? IRS? Is there nobody in government keeping an eye on this stuff?) designed as a combination tax-dodge/end run-on public disclosure laws regarding executive compensation, just how beholden do you think that will make the director on the receiving end of such largesse?

It's almost impossible to untangle all the potential conflicts of interest, necessarily symbiotic exchanges, and the publc interest as it's promoted/produced by the wealthy collectors who serve on the MoMA board, wihch is where you would hope that the mainstream media (MSM) should step in. Now that the Times has opened the can of worms, where is the follow up? Why aren't there reporters ringing Lowry's phone off the hook? The truth of the matter is, the only ones discussing this issue with any detail (and apparently the only ones attempting to hold Lowry's feet to the fire on this one) have been the art bloggers—most especially, Lee Rosenbaum's CultureGrrl and Tyler Green's Modern Art Notes (both indispensable sources of current art news/gossip).

The hubris has been, to use Green's phrase, "slobberknocking." When Rosenbaum first tried to contact Lowry for his response to the NYT article, he demurred, saying he was in Mexico City and hadn't read the article yet. (I think there are computers connected to the Internet, even in Mexico!) Since then, nothing official from the museum, and only tangential remarks by Lowry have surfaced at public appearances—and when Rosenbaum bothered to pose The Question at a recent panel event, she was treated like Typhoid Mary for daring to ask such a thing. All this "old boys club," genteel behavior of the upper-crusties really has to stop—MoMA is a public institution, funded with PLENTY of public funds in the form of tax breaks, government bonds, etc. (not to mention the $20 a pop the plebes have to pay to get in), and we ought to know what the management is being paid, and by whom.

How hard is that?

Beth E. Wilson has served as the resident art critic for Chronogram since 1999. Trained as an art historian, she also teaches art history at SUNY New Paltz.