Close Encounters The Art World Naming Blight By Linda Yablonsky

Close Encounters The Art World Naming Blight By Linda Yablonsky

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Last week, with collectors swarming Miami Beach in profligate display, the Miami Art Museum announced that it would rename itself the

Jorge M. Prez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County. Prez, it was explained, is a local real estate developer who is donating $15 million

to the expanding museums $200 capital campaign, on top of $5 million he already gave.
One MAM trustee, Mary Frank, was so outraged by the renaming that she quit the board (as did three other trustees, at last report).

As she complained in an open letter to the Miami Herald, local taxpayers are contributing $100 million. Obviously, that sum outstrips

the Prez donation, but he is also giving the museum part of his collection of Latin American art. Reports didnt say which part.

Its anyones guess how masterful it is, but the whole collection is said to be worth another $15 million. Thats still not enough to

buy the place.
Museums are collectors too, and they like to choose the art best suited to their programs. Forced to swallow a single persons taste

as well as his name, just for taking his money, they risk compromising the integrity of the collection and the identity of the

institution. Thats one argument, anyway.
Still, when public institutions privilege single patrons, it can definitely rub others the wrong way. Yet Prez is hardly the first

rich man to exercise his inner Donald Trump.
After a $100 million donation in 2008, the main branch of the New York Public Library, a landmark owned by the City of New York,

became the Stephen A. Schwartzman Building. To be fair, the idea was the librarys, not Schwartzmans, but the conservative-leaning

(if not conservative-spending) hedge-fund billionaire didnt insist on a discreet plaque in the lobby, either. His name is set in

stone on either side of the Fifth Avenue entrance, on an engraved plaque inside the door, and in case you miss any of those, its

also on the torcheres at the 42nd Street entrance. After dark, each is lit up by its own spotlight.
That is only one of the more egregious examples of the institutional name game, which is becoming a real blight. To show its

gratitude for the $100 million that came from another hedge-fund billionaire, David Koch, the New York State Theater at Lincoln

Center -- at this writing it is still Lincoln Center -- renamed itself the David H. Koch Theater. It is just across the plaza from

Avery Fisher Hall, formerly Philharmonic Hall.
This isnt just philanthropy. Its a branding tactic. Does the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra not play in Verizon Hall? Does the

Roundabout Theater Company not perform in the American Airlines Theater? It gets confusing.
The art world is hardly immune to this disease. Its institutions regularly take the names of big donors. The expanded Museum of

Modern Art building is now named for David and Peggy Rockefeller, but MoMA is not a public institution and it is still called the

Museum of Modern Art, even if the galleries inside it are named for people who didnt donate the art that is hanging in them. Ditto

the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where the Eli and Edythe Broad Museum of Contemporary Art shows, but does not own, some of its

patrons art collection.
Buildings arent the only cultural turf a one-percenter can buy. Titles are also for sale. Adam Weinberg is the Alice Pratt Brown

director of the Whitney Museum. At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Garry Garrels functions as the Elise S. Haas Senior

Curator of Painting and Sculpture. And Lisa Phillips is the New Museums Toby Devan Lewis Director.

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