A rebours (“Against the Grain”), installation view, Venus Over Manhattan

This week at The L Magazine I discuss Adam Lindemann’s show a rebours at Venus Over Manhattan. You know what? I mostly like it.

Visiting Venus Over Manhattan up on 77th and Madison feels a little like discovering a glittering mausoleum. The gallery space is dark with spotlighted objects, and its walls are fake-raw: though the cement floor is filled with gashes and holes and the drywall is exposed, there’s not so much as a nick from the installation process, and the screws have been perfectly screwed. The floor has even been treated with that special gallery gloss.

In short, it’s impossible to forget you’re in rich-person land. The exhibition design decisions simply underscore the exhibition conceit: the show is a 21st-century remaking of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884 novel A rebours (“Against the Grain”), a story about a millionaire and aesthete who, in his disdain for the bourgeois, attempts to create an ideal artistic world in the form of a tomb. Gallery owner, curator and collector Adam Lindemann plays the role of Jean des Esseintes, chronicling the character’s unusual erotic desires and tastes through art.

To read the full review click here.

Cute baby tigers have invaded the Lower East Side! Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard has brought the joy of two tigers, surrounded by designer adult diapers, into Ramiken Crucible. It’s all for his current show IDEAL POLE. And from what we’ve seen on Instagram, it seems like these two furballs have been getting into some YouTube-worthy trouble by ripping up their play area and lounging around with stuffed animals.

We have no clue what the city by-laws are for housing exotic animals, but we’re going because the Bronx Zoo won’t let you get this close to a tiger. A word of warning though: despite the undoubtable charm of these furry little things, the rest of the exhibition won’t be so G-rated. Apparently, the show has something to do with barebacking and Jesus. IDEAL POLE closes at Ramiken Crucible on July 8th, but the tigers will leave on June 3rd.

Cash money.

Whether you’re a collector, a dealer, or just an observer, the art market can be a confusing place. Right now, since we’re in yet another art bubble, it’s a very expensive confusing place. Like most expensive confusing places, it’s full of people who want your money, and who would like you to believe that giving it to them constitutes a wise investment.

So, to commemorate the launch of artnet’s new art market index and the eruption of ill-advised bright ideas that’s sure to follow, we’re here to remind you that art will probably never make you any money.

Here are nine published statements from economists who have studied the art market professionally, with numbers and math and everything, categorized into four general lessons to be learnt from academia.

1. Art is a terrible investment, unless art investment is your full-time job.

Mandel, B. (2009) “Art as an Investment and Conspicuous Consumption Good”

“The empirical literature measuring average art prices is extensive, and the estimated long-run real return on art is quite low.”

…

“These studies find that art often underperforms relative to equities and bonds. While there have been stunning individual success stories in art investment, long-term average returns are lower than for equity and, in several cases, the mean real return of “risk-free” government bonds exceeds that of art, implying a negative risk premium.” [Ed.: That is, investing in art is less safe than investing in bonds, and also less profitable.]

Worthington, A. and H. Higgs (2003) “Art as an investment: short and long-term comovements in major painting markets”

“Unfortunately, little empirical evidence exists concerning short and long-term price linkages among differing art and financial markets and the concomitant prospects for portfolio diversification. The evidence that does exist is generally mixed.”

Goetzmann, W.N. (1993) “Accounting for Taste: Art and Financial Markets over Three Centuries.”

“While returns to art investment have exceeded inflation for long periods, and returns in the second half of the 20th century have rivalled the stock market, they are no higher than would be justified by the extraordinary risks they represent.”

Agnello, R. (2002) “Investment Returns and the Risk for Art: Evidence from Auctions of American Paintings”

“In contrast to the anecdotal evidence on returns, economic studies of painting investment have not supported claims of financial success.”

Melnik, A.L. and S. E. Plaut (2008) “Art as a Component in Investment Portfolios”

A small but growing body of academic research has addressed the question of whether art  should be a part of an optimal investment portfolios and, if so, to what extent. Frey and  Pommerehne (1989) examine an interesting sample that stretches over 350 years and conclude  that painting investments yielded on average a 1.5% real return, less than financial assets. In other recent papers, such as Renneboog and Van Houtte (2002), the conclusion has been that it should be at most in very small proportions and indeed may well be absent altogether from optimal portfolios (or even shorted).

2. If someone uses the term “masterpiece” to refer to a work of art, it has probably already peaked.

Ashenfelter, O. and K. Graddy (2002) “Auctions and the Price of Art”:

“The evidence clearly suggests that, contrary to the view of the art trade, “masterpieces” underperform the market.”

Moses, M. and J. Mei (2002) “Art as an Investment and the Underperformance of Masterpieces”:

“There is strong evidence of underperformance of masterpieces, meaning expensive paintings tend to underperform the art market index.”

3. If anything works, it’s probably buying and holding.

Landes, W. (2000) “Winning the Art Lottery: The Economic Returns to the Ganz Collection”:

“As the title “Winning the Art Lottery” implies the Ganzes turned a modest investment in art over a 50-year period into a collection worth more than $250 million. Yet the term “lottery” doesn’t quite capture the journey they traveled or the way they succeeded. They didn’t hit the jackpot overnight. Rather they spent a good deal of time and effort searching and acquiring art over many years. And like long-term investors in general, they had enough confidence in their purchases that they followed a “buy and hold” strategy. Occasionally they exchanged works for other works but they rarely sold art. They held only three of the 83 sampled works auctioned in 1986, 1988 and 1997 for less than 10 years. They held seventy-three for more than 20 years.”

4. Art market bubbles occur “whenever income inequality rises quickly.”

Goetzmann, W.N., L. Renneboog, and C. Spaenjers (2009) “Art and Money”:

“Taken together, these results demonstrate that it is indeed the wealth of the wealthy that drives art prices. This implies that we can expect art booms whenever income inequality rises quickly. This seems exactly what we witnessed during the last period of strong art price appreciation, 2002-2007. Indeed, in many countries with  large numbers of art buyers, income inequality has risen significantly in those years, mainly due to strong increases in managerial compensation. Andy Warhol, for one, would probably have applauded this evolution: “I don’t think everybody should have money. It shouldn’t be for everybody—you wouldn’t know who was important” (Warhol, 1975).”

The Avant/Garde Diaries is a digital portrait magazine that invites leading creatives to talk about the cutting edge of art, design, fashion, music and film. In each digital portrait, featured diarists are asked to introduce someone or something they consider to be ahead of their time. The result is a collection of very personal snapshots that celebrate new ways of thinking and spread inspiration. Be sure to check out the complete video portrait library at theavantgardediaries.com.

One recent video, “Taking Chances,” features Swiss pro snowboarder Nicolas Mueller and L.A. based action sports manager Circe Wallace. The two met in Muellers picturesque hometown Laax in Switzerland, went snowboarding and spoke about taking risks and the need in recognizing chances.

Find out more at avantgardediaries.com or facebook.com/avantgardediaries

Whitney Groundbreaking with Michael Bloomberg, Adam Weinberg, Robert Hurst, Neil Bluhm, Brooke Garber Neidich, and Kate Levin

I guess we know why Whitney Director Adam D. Weinberg was willing to say the museum had no intention “to respond one way or the other” about Sotheby’s art handler lockout. This morning we received a tip that the Whitney is planning an auction through Sotheby’s to fund the construction of their new building. Donated works will kick off the Sotheby’s day and evening sales on November 12-14, 2012. The Museum is asking selected blue-chip artists for donations of work worth over $500,000 and their total goal is $15 million.

While we support the museum’s construction efforts, we find the use of Sotheby’s unacceptable and are asking artists to refuse the Whitney’s requests for donations. Sotheby’s has locked out their handlers and is demanding the gutting of the art handlers’ union, the elimination of health insurance and other benefits, and the replacement of full-time skilled workers with temporary unskilled laborers. They are making these demands in the midst of another year of record-breaking profits.

The Whitney’s decision to use Sotheby’s should be cause for great embarrassment. The museum has other choices and should have explored them. Surely Christie’s could have just as easily managed that sale; multiple board members at the Whitney have direct ties to Christie’s, and Whitney trustee Casey Wasserman just sold a portion of his grandparents’ collection at the auction house last fall. Holding this auction in a way that supports workers might have been very easy.

But now it’s not, and we’re asking artists to help. If you’re being asked to donate work to the Whitney, refuse to do it unless the museum uses a different auction house. Sign our petition, and when you do, send us an email and let us know. The museum doesn’t have to use Sotheby’s, a company bent on exploiting its workers. It’s doing so because no one’s made it clear to them that they shouldn’t.

• A judge ruled California’s 35-year-old droit de suite law unconstitutional. [Reuters]
• Christie’s post-war and contemporary evening sale in New York made  $388 million—but only 5% came from sales by female artists. [The Economist]
• The Whitney Museum gets bigger. My bad, that’s just a shipping container. [Archinet]
• The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, in Kansas City, MO, isn’t doing too well. Its director resigned last week, after the resignation or elimination of at least four other employees. [The Kansas City Star]
• Artnet gets interviewed by “The Street,” a finance blog, about its abilities to predict art market trends. Overall, Thomas Galbraith, director of analytics at artnet, doesn’t say much that would convince a millionaire to buy art.  ”We examine particular collecting categories at the top-end then we break out those categories into its constituents,” said Galbraith. [The Street]
• According to one study, Facebook users are vain. Another one says only the ones with thousands of friends are vain. The third one says Twitter users are the real vain ones. I predict the fourth one will vainly realize that beauty is in the eye of the Facebook shareholder. [The New York Times Well Blog]
• By most accounts, the Great GoogaMooga was a disaster. The hating notably includes a few rants by The New York Times film critic A.O. Scott. [Eater]
• In Chicago, the G8 Summit has caused several museums to close their doors for the entirety of the summit. They each cited security issues, though we’ve also heard that it’s because of private tours given to government officials. [Chicago G8]

David Cruz, Quemar el tiempo en agua gris, 2012, still from video installation. (Unless otherwise noted, Flesh and Concrete images from fleshandconcrete.net.)

With Flesh and Concrete, Jaya Kara Brekke and Julio Salazar have organized an art exhibition with ramifications well beyond the aesthetic. The exhibition, the winner of apexart’s Franchise Program, was conceived in reaction to the construction of the Supervia, an intrusive highway being built through Mexico City for the purpose of ameliorating the brutal traffic experienced by residents and white-collar workers of Santa Fe, an important business district and affluent area of the city. Despite the very specific subsection of the population that would benefit from the Supervia—people with enough money to have a car and pay the toll, who live in Santa Fe—the highway is being built at great cost with public money, and it has displaced many less affluent people from their homes. Many of these poorer, long-standing neighborhoods have now been destroyed. The inevitability of the highway is, at this stage, a given.

The efforts of Brekke and Salazar stand in the face of this inevitability, determined to not let this project—“one,” they say, “of so many infrastructure mega-projects built the world over”—go by unnoticed.

Ale de la Puente, espacio (en...), 2012, advertising banners, installation view in elevator shaft.

The exhibition space, an abandoned concrete building overlooking the Supervia, is the geographical center for more ephemeral programming, including walks, presentations and bike tours. There is an informative and articulate text written by the curators. Since apexart awards funding based on strength of proposal, it should be no surprise that winning submissions are generally very good.

We visited the city recently and were able to make it to the opening. We were staying close by, which meant a lot; in Mexico City, distances are long and getting from one place to another can be difficult. Flesh and Concrete is situated near the start of the Supervia, by necessity and to its benefit. It is far away from most galleries and art centers, and it takes a commitment to make it there.

We walked to the exhibition space, the last stretch along the path of the highway under construction. No one noticed it. In sprawling urban environments, the existence and consequences of construction generally don’t get a second thought; it just seems normal. Human-scale perception can’t do justice to the impact on the landscape. To someone more familiar with the city it might have looked different, but to us, it looked like something that belonged there, another roadway, this one layered on top of the others. We had just passed through a shopping center with a Krispy Kreme and a McDonald’s, so a large-scale public works project didn’t seem that out of place. It was another comforting sign of modernity.

When we arrived at the opening, a young woman assumed we were part of the crew, since they seemed to know everyone who was coming. She handed us brochures and gave an overview of the exhibition. We assumed she was the curator; she had a command of the material and appeared to be very invested in the exhibition. She was a volunteer. Upstairs, we saw the crew, a few guys were setting up smoke machines and the electrical for a couple installations, while others put up rudimentary drywall barriers, to at least bring notice to the wide-open elevator shafts.

It’s a mystery how the organizers were able to get such an ideal space for this show. Brekke told me that they had originally wanted to have the exhibition on the highway itself, while it was being built. They had some productive talks with the construction company, but soon it became apparent that it wasn’t going to happen. Critically, the exhibition space needed to have a “material relationship” to the Supervia; it was important that a viewer engaging the space would be forced into a contextual and corporeal engagement with the Supervia, which could really only happen in close proximity to the construction. They eventually found an ideal location, a raw space, an “unfinished building, abandoned for twenty-something years,” overlooking the construction site. When we visited, for the opening, it was after dark. From the roof you could see the entire city, which is massive and dense. Construction crews on the Supervia continued their work.

Francisco Ugarte, We are not afraid of ruins..., 2012, smoke and light, installation view.

The six artists in the exhibition were chosen because they were genuinely interested in the project. They’re all from Mexico and work in Mexico City. The work is site-specific installations, all of them invoking an elemental quality that adds to the sense of place. Erick Diego suspended flower pots under daylights as the visual component of a discordant sound installation. The audio was a mashup of two sets of recordings Diego had done, one of city traffic and one of a river. The source material is appropriate, as the building stands between the highway and the Magdalena River. A floor above, Francisco Ugarte used colored lights to illuminate the forgotten, graffiti-filled spaces of the building. Spare and atmospheric, it was successful as it was, though the smoke machines would later be part of this.

Things became a little more heavy-handed (in the sense that the installations were more obviously “art”) the higher up we went. All of it, though, never tried to be something greater than it was; it was always in a relationship with the building and the Supervia. One floor had a fire pit filled with smoldering charcoal; in the corner, David Cruz had tucked a video of himself on the roof for 24 hours, a self-portrait of exposure. His predicament was a stand-in for the “urban condition,” only here without diversion or means of escape.

One floor of the building was completely dark, but open to walk through. My companion noticed small piles of rubble and dirt everywhere we looked; someone had taken the time to neatly sweep up its years’ accumulations. I suspected that so minimal an intervention would be too much to pass as an installation; I guessed it was either a vacant floor or something in progress, something more intrusive. To us, the vines coming in through the windows were accidental, a fitting intrusion by mother nature. We couldn’t see it, but this was the stage for an installation by Daniel Monroy Cuevas, hidden in darkness. From images, later, I learned he used refracted natural light to alter the experience of the space, creating a site-specific video installation that links the intangible qualities of the outside environment with the architecture. Outside, blinding construction lights shone endlessly.

The length of one elevator shaft was lined with those triangular plastic flags you see at an open house for a new condo desperate to sell units. Ale de la Puente has appropriated them as a symbol of gratuitous construction; not for need, but for profit. The largest crowd was gathered around Diana Quintero’s installation of birds’ silhouettes. Perhaps the most accessible work, it was hopeful in spirit and visually beautiful, adding lightness to the ensemble. Everywhere we went in the building, we found reminders of modern life. Every unfinished apartment seemed identical, and identically transformed by the disrepair; what once were closets, now, at night, became repeating dark voids. Importantly, the installations only occupied small portions of vast floors, leaving space to walk and think.

Left, Erick Diego, Flores de Concreto, 2012, sound installation; right, Diana Quintero, “Vuelos,” 2012, installation view. (Left image, GF; right image found on Twitter.)

The Supervia is a singular event for Mexico City, but it is also a stand-in for high-profile infrastructure projects all over the world, the kind of projects that politicians, policymakers, and moneyed interests deem to be in the “greater good.” For people like this, decision-makers and bureaucrats, it doesn’t matter if the damage to the earth and established communities is long-term; they instead look to short-term “success”—even if this success is presumptive at best.

Brekke and Salazar, the exhibition’s organizers, spent a long time seeking out input from as many different people, from disparate backgrounds, as they could, to approach a comprehensive view of the effect the Supervia has had on Mexico City and its inhabitants. The exhibition and its related programs and texts are informed by their “field work,” their outreach to local residents, academics, artists, architects and activists. They are in the process of producing a book that they hope will unify these wide-ranging and hard-to-classify investigations.

View from the rooftop, Flesh and Concrete. (GF)

My default position is that art, at its best, serves no obvious purpose. Mexico City is a great place to be disabused of opinions like these. Flesh and Concrete is political and aesthetic in scope, and part of what it is doing right is the message: the highway does much more harm than good; it is can hardly begin to solve the transportation riddle in this massive city; it will exist and operate at a human, ecological, and financial loss. The installations are mostly oblique, and it’s up to the viewer to make the connections. As Brekke and Salazar have acknowledged, the art, although “grounded in specific aspects of the consequences of the Supervia,” is not there to “explain” anything—instead, “we have text for that.”

What is amazing about Flesh and Concrete is that it flattens so many things disagreeable about art and makes them irrelevant: everything they have done is perfect, from the building to the art and the surrounding programs. I know some of this only through the documentation, but the excellence is self-evident. It was achieved the only way possible: passionately, persistently, and thoughtfully. It is like reality, in that nothing seems out of place. Just as the Supervia will quickly take its place in the landscape of the city, Flesh and Concrete, in its brief incarnation, seems to be in the right place, its existence somehow necessary. The interaction between art and reality is subtle, and all the more meaningful for it.

Flesh and Concrete ran from April 19th to May 17th at Periférico Norponiente, Blvr. Adolfo Ruiz Cortinez #3380, Edif. B, Mexico City.

Daniel Monroy Cuevas, Periférico #3380, 2012, still from video installation.

It’s uncommon for non-profits to sell private information about their donors and other members, but the College Art Association (CAA) doesn’t wag like everyone else:  the organization sells its members’ home addresses to direct mail companies. To be fair, CAA provides an option for new members to refuse the release of their private information when signing up; that’s required by federal law.

This doesn’t negate the fact that many other arts non-profits look down on this practice. We asked Rhizome nor Independent Curators International (ICI) whether they release information on their members, and representatives from both organizations expressed shock that a non-profit would do such a thing. “We don’t endorse that,” said Zoe Salditch, Program Director at Rhizome.

We discovered CAA’s direct mail dealings by perusing their advertising page. The downloadable “Membership Mailing List” order form includes the disclaimer that “CAA reserves the right to refuse any order whose content it deems inappropriate.” This means members won’t receive fliers for car insurance, but they might end up with academic junk mail, like unsolicited brochures from textbook publishers.

As for opting out of CAA’s mailing list rental program, new members can do so online. After confirming a membership package, a warning page pops up. Unchecking the last box will remove the new member’s address from CAA’s mailing list rentals.

Opting out as a renewing member, though, is trickier. If you’re like me, someone whose membership has elapsed, this page doesn’t pop up, leaving no chance to change your mailing list options online.

The advantages for CAA’s snail mail practice appear small when looking at the organization’s financials. Approximately 12,000 artists, art historians, and museum staff pay to wield a CAA membership card, which created $1.9 million in revenue for the organization in 2010. That same year, CAA made only $28,557 in revenue from their mailing list rentals. That’s not chump change—it’s probably somebody’s salary—but it’s also only $2 per member, from an organization that charges $65 to $195 for a basic membership. For such a sketchy practice, there isn’t much of a financial benefit for keeping it in place.

As a non-profit, CAA has no financial or mission-related justification for bringing in money through old-fashioned junk mail. And the organization, whose current relevance relies on its annual conference for job seekers in the arts, isn’t looking au courant by sending out unsolicited snail mail. Regardless of whether CAA sends out e-junk or just junk, we expect more from non-profits than selling our personal information.

• Roberta Smith likes the New Barnes and believes the collection should be moved around from time to time. “Blasphemy!” say Barnes purists. Tyler Green says over Twitter that the idea that the collection wasn’t important when it was in Lower Merion is dumb. He’s right, of course, but who exactly is he arguing with? Smith never said that. [NYTimes]
• Christopher Knight doesn’t like the new Barnes, but both he and Roberta believe the Matisse stairwell paintings suffer now that they’re not in a stairwell. AFC’s Will Brand noted this morning in the office that New Yorkers already have a Matisse in a stairwell at MoMA. Is it really necessary to complain that much? [LATimes]
• Animal New York relaunched yesterday. Fancy! [Animal]
• An interview with Lorna Mills on the Triangulation Blog. In answer to the question of whether posting GIFs on Google Plus is promotion, Mills says, “I only think of promotion as posting exhibition info on G+ and Facebook. The rest of the time I’m making GIFs to throw in the G+ streams, so it doesn’t feel like promo, it just feels like participating in a community of GIF makers.” [Triangulation Blog]
• The New York Public Library prepares for the future in which all library materials become available through digital devices, and decides to rip the heart out of the central research collection. #longreads [N+1]
• Support El Celso’s La Luz (The Light), an installation project in Peru. He’s got under $1,500 to raise. I pledged yesterday—you can too! [Kickstarter]
• If you’re swinging by Seven this weekend (it closes Saturday), then you can also catch the tail end of the inaugural group show at the new Williamsburg gallery Reverse Space. The show features work by emerging artists, including AFC friend Armando Veve. [Reverse Space]

Old Barnes Foundation, with partial view of Matisse's "The Dance II," 1932. Photo courtesy of artnet.

After years of controversy and legal battles, the Philadelphia-based Barnes Collection has moved. Its initiator, pharmaceuticals mogul Albert C. Barnes, who died in 1951, clearly stipulated in his will that none of the work should leave its salon-style installation in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania. Barnes left behind one of the most significant late 19th and early 20th century art collections in the world; by 2004, the Foundation reported severe financial and maintenance problems and planned its move to the new building in downtown Philadelphia, next to the Rodin Museum. A judge ordered that the arrangement be replicated in the new building, and, according to Justin Davidson and Jerry Saltz, the new museum actually allows visitors to see the work, which was difficult in the dark and crowded old house. ”Owners are temporary caretakers,” Jerry Saltz points out. So if we’re much better able to view a few thousand artworks, including 181 Renoirs, 69 Cézannes, 59 Matisses, and 44 Picassos, and it’s still hung the same, then why worry about the demands of a dead rich guy?

The move was the subject of 2009 documentary “Art of the Steal,” which paints this as a decades-long plot by local politicians to create a tourist attraction for downtown Philadelphia. According to the film, the Foundation’s imminent bankruptcy was exaggerated in order to facilitate the move. Barnes, a man of blue-collar roots, had hoped to keep the now $25 billion collection out of enterprising hands.

Barnes was also an early collector and advocate of black artists. When he died, he left the Foundation in the stewardship of Lincoln University, a historically black college, giving it the right to nominate four out of five members of the board. At the time of the move, the Barnes Foundation expanded the board from five to fifteen members, effectively curbing the university’s control of the board; the Pew Charitable Trusts, The Annenberg Foundation, and Lenfest Foundations all raised the $200 million for the move. According to the Friends of the Barnes Foundation website, Lincoln University agreed to drop all opposition to the move in 2003, three days before holding a board meeting in which they discussed the receipt of $80 million in new taxpayer funds.

What was so loved about the old location, wrote Nicolai Ouroussoff for the New York Times, was a connection between collector, art, and viewer which was deeply personal—”like poking around in someone’s bedroom.” Like the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Barnes was one of the few remaining alternatives to conventional museums. That wasn’t accidental; as Ouroussoff writes, “What the museums all had…was an eagerness to challenge convention. Albert C. Barnes and J. Paul Getty saw themselves as cultural outsiders. Both saw their museums as ways to thumb their noses at cultural insiders…”

As Tyler Green pointed out a few months ago, there was a Matisse mural in the original house which was considered site-specific. By moving it, he argued, the Barnes Foundation was destroying many of its innate characteristics, like its relationship to the view out the window and the proportions of the archways on which it was painted. But this raises a daunting question: what would every single one of the artists in the Barnes collection—including Native Americans, African artists, and folk artists—have wanted? Somebody probably wants this Fang “Reliquary Guardian Head” back, too.

Plus, it’s not as though Barnes acquired all of this stuff with the wishes of former collectors in mind. Similar to MoMA’s pipeline from Europe during WWII, Barnes accrued most of the collection during the Great Depression. Writing for Philanthropy Magazine, James Panero of the New Criterion quotes him: “Particularly during the Depression, my specialty was robbing the suckers who had invested all their of money in flimsy securities and then had to sell their priceless paintings to keep a roof over their heads.” If the Barnes Foundation’s bankruptcy plea was true, and Panero makes a convincing case for it, then there’s a poetic justice to those words.

Aside from the impact of the move on Lower Merion and Lincoln University, the argument that we should uphold Barnes’s wishes in perpetuity, simply because he had the legal rights to these objects at the time of his death, is stupid. While Panero argues that failing to uphold Barnes’s wishes could “discourage future donors from believing that their intent will be honored,” collectors should know that circumstances will fast outstrip any plans for the future. Decisions will inevitably be made, and each generation will have to ensure that the work is handled responsibly for a little while. Nobody should expect to make personal, preferential demands of a future world; if they succeed, that only makes us a bunch of suckers.