Detroit doesn't have to wait for Antiques Roadshow to come to town to know the city owns priceless treasures. The city-owned Detroit Institute of Arts holds works by van Gogh, Matisse, Renoir and other artists that could bring in tens of millions of dollars each.
And they just might sell. With the city more than $15 billion in debt, Kevyn Orr, the state-appointed emergency manager trying to straighten out Detroit's finances, has asked the museum to inventory its works with an eye toward potentially selling them off.
It's a scenario that has people in the art world up in arms. When Edsel Ford commissioned Diego Rivera to paint murals for the museum back in 1932, he wasn't thinking they might be sold in 2013 to pay for pensions.
"To sell off artwork to pay for a city's general debt is unconscionable," says Kathleen Bernhardt, an art dealer in Chicago. "It's a short-term sell-off of a magnificent part of their heritage."
Museums sell works all the time, but typically not their best stuff. When they do sell, it's to get rid of pieces that don't suit the collection. They use the money to buy new works that are a better fit. They're not supposed to use the money to buy computers or pay down debt, according to industry standards.
But when museums aren't free-standing institutions, as is the case in Detroit, the larger entities that control them sometimes can't help but see dollar signs. The van Goghs are just hanging there, waiting to be put up for auction.
"A lot of institutions are gun-shy about trumpeting what the size of their assets [is], so that a trustee is not tempted to sell them off," says Kris Anderson, director of the Jacob Lawrence Gallery at the University of Washington.
Some Universities Want To Sell
All museums have to inventory their works for insurance purposes. But Anderson says the bottom line has been more closely held information ever since Brandeis University talked about selling off the entire collection of its Rose Art Museum back in 2009.
"In the case of Brandeis, you had a truly visionary president who did so much good for the university, but got caught up in a very short-term temptation to look at an easy fix," says Michael Rush, who then served as Rose's director. "To our way of thinking, the university was really selling its birthright by even considering selling its collection."
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