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...concerned about that. The Abu Dhabi deal alone will bring the Louvre $900 million - $600 million for the right to use the Louvre name for 30 years, and the rest for services that include lending up to 300 works. (The total deal amounts to $1.3 billion; some other French museums participating in the government-backed project will share the rest of the proceeds.) When the deal was struck last year, an Internet petition declaring "our museums are not for sale" quickly drew several thousand signatures, including those of well-known curators and others in the French art world. The Louvre...
...other big complaint is about the introduction of contemporary art. Fumaroli wrote an indignant piece in the French magazine Beaux-Arts about the biggest show to date, an exhibition by Belgian artist Jan Fabre that was held earlier this summer in galleries containing Dutch and Flemish masterpieces. Among the highlights: a table strewn with feathered sculptures depicting the severed heads of seven owls in the same room as Van Dyck portraits, and a gigantic earthworm wriggling on upended gravestones sharing a space with 21 Rubens depictions of Marie de Medicis. The show was part of a series called "Counterpoints," designed...
Displeasing the traditionalists might have had important repercussions in the past, but these days the museum can largely shrug them off. That's because, under Loyrette and his deputy Selles, the Louvre is becoming ever less dependent on France's establishment. The French state, which wholly funded the museum for much of its history, still subsidizes it generously, doling out about $180 million in 2008. But that's only about half the total budget. The rest is raised by the Louvre itself, from ticket sales, traveling-exhibition receipts, and above all donations by French companies and American and other philanthropists...
...from government bureaucrats and, in exchange, signing a deal with the Culture Ministry that commits it to meet certain performance targets. In the past, the Louvre didn't even get the receipts of its ticket sales - instead, the money was put in a pot and divided up among all French museums. "We used to live in an absurd system, a universe that was completely archaic," Selles says...
...bottom line is that the Louvre has a lot more money to play with than in the past. Its annual acquisition budget has jumped from $4.5 million in 2004 to $36 million last year. Changes to French tax law in 2003 have helped: companies now have big fiscal incentives to make donations. But Loyrette has also built out the tiny three-man fund-raising department that Rosenberg set up in the late '90s into a full-time operation with 19 staffers. And the Louvre is about to launch a U.S.-style endowment fund - the first in France - using the money...