Word: rose
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There's a Stephen Sondheim lyric that says it all: "Art isn't easy." Last week Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., stunned both the academic and art worlds when it announced that it would shut down its Rose Art Museum and sell the collection. The reason was an institutional budget crisis - not at the museum, which is largely self-sufficient, but at the university. Since June, Brandeis has seen its endowment fall from $712 million to $530 million. Over the next six years it projects a budget shortfall totaling $79 million. And the collapse of Bernard Madoff's alleged Ponzi...
Meanwhile there was the Rose, with its collection of more than 7,100 objects, including works by major American artists like Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. In 2007 the collection was assessed by the auction house Christie's to be worth around $350 million. The downturn in the art market since last fall makes its value today anybody's guess, but it would still command a sizable sum. Brandeis trustees insist that if they can't raise money by selling art, they will have to reduce staff by 30% - there were already cuts last year...
That Christie's appraisal of the Rose collection was ordered up by the museum's now thoroughly traumatized director, Michael Rush, who did not learn that Brandeis had plans for his museum until the day the school made its initial announcement. He wanted to arrive at a dollar figure for the collection, he says, for insurance purposes, but also to raise the profile of the museum in the eyes of campus administrators. "I thought that the more information they had about how great this place was, the better it would be," he says. "That may have backfired...
Reinharz issued his letter after receiving one signed by more than 60 faculty members complaining that they had not been consulted on the future of the Rose and urging him to suspend any decisions on the matter. Last week a group of Brandeis students also staged a sit-in to protest the closing...
...just why is Brandeis so intent on repurposing the Rose, in whatever way? For a university with a considerable art-history program, which Brandeis is, to remake its museum into something other than a museum is like an agriculture school selling off its livestock. It means eliminating an important teaching resource...