Shades of Conflicting Interests

According to boosters of the 17-month-old Orange County Museum of Art, their institution is zooming toward “world-class” status.

The museum hopes to make its mark by embracing a big slice of California art. But aspects of a current traveling exhibition, “California Style: 1930s and ‘40s”--curated by David Stary-Sheets for the obscure Sebastopol Center for the Arts in Northern California--suggest that OCMA needs to consider the manner in which it is going about its goals.

Stary-Sheets, who lent two paintings from his own collection to the show, owns Stary-Sheets Fine Art. The Laguna Beach commercial gallery specializes in the paintings of California regionalists--precisely the theme of “California Style.”

Stary-Sheets, son of painter Millard Sheets, is well-versed in Depression-era California painting, and he undoubtedly has ready access to good examples of the work that he has sold throughout the years.

So what is the problem with this arrangement?

Museums are nonprofit institutions whose mission is to collect and preserve art and to teach the public about it. Museums collect works because the professional staff believes them to be important historically and aesthetically, not for financial gain. (Most museums prohibit proceeds of the sale of works of art to be used for anything except the purchase of more art.)

Art dealers, however, treat art as a commodity whose shifting value hinges on many variables.

These variables include the artist’s degree of popularity and critical acclaim and the work’s provenance (former owners), size, condition, subject, rarity--and its exhibition history. Being shown in a respected museum is a form of validation--a sign that a curator with no pecuniary interest in the work considers it an exceptional piece.

Major institutions do not host exhibitions of art organized by dealers who specialize in it. They would lose their all-important scholarly remove if a curator’s financial interests were wrapped up in the art he selected to exhibit.

To be sure, the art world is far from “pure.” Collectors making major contributions to the cost of a catalog of a show are often rewarded with catalog reproductions of their pieces. Art dealers routinely lend works to museum shows and reap both tangible and intangible rewards. Some dealers have close working relationships with museum curators.

Still, it behooves a museum to ensure a degree of distance from the commercial arena of art. This church-and-state relationship stands behind many policies of reputable museums. For example, they refer sales inquiries about exhibition works to a dealer, and they do not sell unwanted works of art from their collection directly to any individual, including dealers or their own trustees.

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So why did OCMA--whose press materials and wall labels curiously omit any mention of Stary-Sheets’ gallery--go out on a limb with this show?

A skeptical viewer might conclude that the museum hopes to court the lenders as future “friends” (read: donors). Of the 11 named lenders to the exhibition (two pieces are from a “private collection”), five are listed as financial contributors to the catalog, a slender publication that mostly serves to illustrate the paintings in the exhibition.

In fact, one of the show’s lenders and benefactors is Gerald E. Buck, a former OCMA board member whose collection--and collecting ambitions--are well known in local art circles.

There’s no harm in a museum trying to lure collectors to the fold. But museums of the caliber to which OCMA aspires know how to attract donations without sacrificing their institutional credibility.