ost art world squabbles never make it past the
echoes of white-walled galleries, but a recent series
of scandals and protests have spilled into the main-
stream, plunging some of the world’s greatest museums into
a crisis that hasn’t been seen since the furor of the 1980s cul-
ture wars.
Back then it was a group of senators attempting to defund
the National Endowment for the Arts. This time, it’s private
philanthropy that’s in the crosshairs. And it’s not politicians
leading the charge but the artists themselves.
The latest head to roll is Warren Kanders, who stepped
down from the board of the Whitney Museum of American
Art on July 25 after a monthslong campaign against him. The
reason: Kanders is chairman and chief executive officer of
Safariland LLC, a manufacturer of tear gas that was purport-
edly used against migrants at the U.S.-Mexican border.
As a response, the group Forensic Architecture partnered
with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras to
make a video critical of Kanders’s businesses that went on
view in the museum’s Whitney Biennial (through Sept. 22).
Another group called Decolonize This Place unfurled ban-
ners on the museum’s facade. Four artists requested that their
work be removed from the museum because they refused
“further complicity with Kanders and his technologies of vio-
lence.” About 100 Whitney staff members signed an open
letter calling for Kanders to quit. In his resignation letter,
Kanders cited “the targeted campaign of attacks against me
and my company.”
At the same time, photographer Nan Goldin has led an
assault on donations from the Sackler family, whose name
is on the walls of institutions including the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York, the Louvre in Paris, and the
Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Mass. The family’s for-
tune is partially derived from the opioid OxyContin, and after
a series of demonstrations this year, the Guggenheim and the
Met in New York as well as the Tate in London announced
they would no longer accept donations from the family. (The
Louvre has since removed the Sacklers’ name.)
The increased scrutiny on the source of museum trustees’
wealth, augmented by the heightened activism in response,
comes at a time when arts institutions are struggling to stay
solvent at all. The American Folk Art Museum had to vacate
its flagship space in New York in 2011; in 2015 the Museum of
Biblical Art in New York closed altogether; earlier this year
the Newseum in Washington, D.C., announced the sale of its
building to Johns Hopkins University.
American cultural institutions, starved of public support,
need to fundraise. But an aging donor
base, changes in the tax code that
inhibit charitable giving, and a younger
generation that prioritizes environ-
mental and political causes over the
arts have forced museums to fight
for donations. This isn’t about capital
campaigns or new buildings—it’s aboutkeeping the lights on.
Admission fees rep-
resent about 16% of the
Met’s total $297million
revenue, according to
its most recent annual
report. Funds generated
by philanthropy (both
from the endowment and
gifts) represented more
than 50%. At the Whitney,
admissions represented
11% of its almost $90 mil-
lion total revenue last
year—there, too, contribu-
tions and grants made up
about 50%. “The business
of a museum is to serve
the public, and those pro-
grams cost more to deliver
than they earn,” says Amy
Kaufman, a museum
consultant whose cli-
ents include the Studio
Museum in Harlem and
Storm King Art Center in
Cornwall, N.Y. “As long as
we choose not to [pub-
licly] fund the majority of
our cultural organizations, we’ll still be investing huge sums
into fundraising year after year.”
Only now, fundraisers must reconcile the current “can-
cel” culture with the fact that massive wealth is inevitably
controversial, which means it’s almost impossible to pre-
dict which trustee might become the next flashpoint. “Just
think, three years ago, would Mr. Kanders have even been
challenged?” says Diana Duke Duncan, a Washington, D.C.-
based museum management consultant who’s worked with
the Smithsonian Institution, the Dallas Museum of Art,
and the Barnes Foundation. “That’s how rapidly things
have changed.”
Since their inception, most of America’s museums have
relied on patrons, many of whom made their money in ways
that some might find unsavory. The Art Institute of Chicago
was spearheaded by Charles Hutchinson, whose Midwestern
meatpacking facilities predated those described by Upton
Sinclair when he wroteThe Jungle, his exposé on the indus-
try. Before steel baron Henry Clay Frick founded his museum
in New York, he achieved notoriety for firing 3,800 striking
steelworkers, then hiring Pinkertons, a private police force,
who shot into the crowd. There might be blameless American
fortunes, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at a register
of the country’s founding museum trustees.
And yet for more than a century, these very muse-
ums have often been champions of a decidedly critical60
ART Bloomberg Pursuits August 19, 2019Previous page,
clockwise from
top left: Kanders;
protesters at
the Whitney; the
Sackler wing at the
Met; protesters at
Harvard; the facade
of the WhitneyGoldin (left) at the
Louvre to protest
Sackler donations;
a die-in at Harvard