Getty spends too little? He’s not buying it

NOW THAT A NEW era is beginning at the Getty Trust, art critics and museum officials across the country have begun to sing a predicable tune: Spend more money on buying art! The problem with the Getty, they chant, is that it didn’t win enough auction battles. The result is that a painting that might have hung in Los Angeles now hangs in another museum. Horrors! Wouldn’t the world be better if the Getty had paid millions more for a painting so that it hangs in one public venue rather than another?

Having spent a king’s ransom on objects from all over the globe -- some of dubious provenance, we now know -- the critics and museum directors want us to believe that the problem with the Getty was that it didn’t pursue acquisitions more aggressively. Nonsense.

We read of the poor Getty Museum having to “compete for resources” with its sibling entities that pursue conservation and research in the history of art.

Has the Getty’s Conservation Institute contributed to the public good? Scientists from the Getty have worked to create sustainable conditions for the preservation of major components of the world’s cultural heritage. In Prague, Getty teams have helped make visible again the extraordinary colors of “The Last Judgment” mosaic at St. Vitus Cathedral. In Iraq, the institute is helping to develop strategies to reduce the threats to the country’s cultural heritage. And in Los Angeles, it is helping to restore and make accessible David Alfaro Siqueiros’ great mural, “America Tropical.”

Now, the Getty isn’t buying this cultural heritage for display in a museum, but why is that a bad thing?

The Getty Research Institute has functioned as a library, a site for intimate exhibitions and a center for scholarship on the history of art. The institute, where I was the associate director in the late 1990s, has brought artists and scholars from around the world together to work on themes or problems in art history. The result has been important translations, collections of essays, individual scholarship and public exhibitions. Surely, Bill Viola’s great “Passions” series would never have been produced had it not been for his time at the institute working among scholars investigating passion and gesture. Important exhibitions on music and art, on “devices of wonder” or on Los Angeles photography were created because of the research made possible by the Getty.

The institution didn’t have to buy the art to enrich both local and international communities.

The Getty Foundation, once called simply a grant program, has had a catalytic effect on museums, cultural heritage organizations, individual scholars and universities. Grants have been used to make art accessible and understandable, and they have supported museums around the world in their efforts to maintain, enhance or thoughtfully exhibit collections. Why is this seen by museum directors and some art critics as less exciting than winning an auction?

Let’s hope that the Getty’s interim president, Deborah Marrow, and the trustees don’t cave in to the chorus of wanna-be shoppers urging the institution to buy more at the highest prices. Rather than following a 19th century museum model, we can hope instead that in this next phase of the Getty’s life, it can creatively fulfill the terms of its benefactor’s original bequest. It was not to go on a shopping spree but to dedicate itself to “the diffusion of artistic and general knowledge.”