At United Nations, Diplomacy Requires Some Artful Dodging

Look around the walls of the United Nations, covered with priceless Picassos and ancient artifacts from around the world, and you’ll notice that maps are conspicuously absent.

With borders on nearly every continent in dispute, maps are considered too politically sensitive to be displayed as part of the vast U.N. art collection.

It’s also no coincidence that the U.N. Arts Committee, which chooses what gifts from U.N. countries get placed where, consists of a single person--one of Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s top political advisors who has no fine arts background.

Indeed, the business of art at the United Nations is hardly artistic. It’s politics and diplomacy at its most basic.

Diplomats try to score subtle political points through their gifts to the organization, and U.N. officials try desperately to avoid insulting any country when the organization has to object to, reject or otherwise intervene over an offering.

“I see my work more as being in the realm of diplomacy than in the realm of curatorship,” concedes arts committee chairman Alvaro de Soto, who on most days carries the title of U.N. assistant secretary-general for political affairs.

He describes his job as a delicate balance of persuasion and tact to try to procure top-notch art and artifacts while ensuring the gifts don’t overwhelm the Minimalist-inspired building.

“The secretary-general and his colleagues have to try to elicit the best, to discourage the worst and to display the collection in the way best suited to the buildings and to each work of art itself,” De Soto’s predecessor, Brian Urquhart, wrote in a preface to a coffee-table book on the collection, “A World of Art: The United Nations Collection.”

The greatest problem facing the arts committee is “preventing the United Nations from becoming a curiosity shop,” Urquhart said in a recent interview.

Urquhart, who is retired, recalls having to politely decline a gift from an unnamed Pacific island ambassador to display a prized, stuffed coelacanth--a prehistoric fish.

A decomposing animal, Urquhart remembers arguing, was perhaps not an appropriate addition to a collection that included a gilded statuette of the god Osiris from Egypt that dated back to 700 BC and a 2,000-year-old burial mantle from Peru.

Urquart similarly labels as an “anatomical freak” a recent gift that caused quite a stir when it was unveiled in the U.N. garden last year.

The life-sized bronze elephant arrived with larger-than-life genitalia, prompting U.N. officials to quickly plant shrubs to try to camouflage the offending body parts.

But on the whole, the art at the United Nations is intentionally without scandal or controversy, and for the most part tries to avoid overtly nationalistic sentiments.

And there are some gems in the public and private halls of the building.

Outside the Security Council hangs an authorized tapestry of Picasso’s “Guernica,” on loan from the estate of Nelson Rockefeller. Not far away is Iraq’s 1977 gift--the Codes of Hammurabi, king of Babylon from 1792 to 1750 BC, written on a tall stone statue and urging that justice prevail in the country.