Brandeis remembers its motto.
…since we’re doing the debate metaphor, I thought I’d finish with my “rebuttal” speech. But since Jehuda ended up “punting” (though not surprisingly and unlike Storey, I applaud him for it), I figure there’s no reason to go through some big point by point refutation. I’ll just make three final statements:
1. The “revelation” in my comments about Storey’s argument wasn’t that he didn’t like art, but that he was arguing on the basis of that dislike. And I haven’t changed my mind, since Storey (while accusing me of arguing “OMG ART IS SO GOOD!!!11!!!!!”) is actually arguing the opposite: science should be Brandeis’s priority, because it should be, because it’s science and Brandeis likes science and it’s a priority.
What?
The truth is that if we’re going to threaten to sell off art because of a financial crisis, we ought to be able to sell off anything–including expensive equipment associated with, I don’t know, science and athletic programs. But perhaps that’s absurd. Perhaps they’ve done feasibility studies and demonstrated that selling art, in a down market, is clearly the best way to make money. Fine. If that’s true, let them show the studies they did. And if they didn’t do the studies, they need to before deciding that fire sales of precious artwork are the best way to rescue a school which it’s unclear even needs rescuing.
2. OMG ART IS SO GOOD!!!11!! This would indeed be a terrible argument if I had made it. Fortunately, I didn’t. Allow me to quote from myself:
Art museums, by contrast, store important things such as, well, art. Paintings. Sculptures. The finest examples of human expression. For any university, one of the primary goals must be not simply to impart knowledge and provide methods of learning–teaching people how to learn, so to speak–but also t0 act as a repository and storehouse of that knowledge and its products, information both written and artistic. It is only this which allowed knowledge to survive during the darkest times of our history when most people found things like books to be a useless luxury and preferred rather to burn them than read them. An absurd premise? Not if you believe, as Storey does, that America is on a path to inevitable annihilation, and that society will eventually break down. If that does happen, you better hope some storehouses of literature, music and art survive, as they did in the monasteries during the Dark Ages, or get ready to start over from scratch. I’d rather not go down that road, thanks. And this is particularly important for Brandeis, a university which was founded on the premise of knowledge and artistic achievement overcoming the ignorance and hatreds of people more interested in behavior driven by anecdotal evidence (”The Jews took my job! The Jews are the problem!”) than the common humanity reflected in the art all races, creeds and ethnicities produce. Art was given to Brandeis specifically because it was the university which would not sell out, which would not forget, which would be a storehouse of memory. It violates both that trust and the spirit which motivates its founding when it decides selling art makes more sense than closing an athletic facility or cutting a bloated program, even if such choices are really necessary.
I think that’s a lot different than ART IS GOOD OMG!!11! The point, which Storey ignores, is that art is a significant preserver of humanity’s cultural legacy, and that Brandeis has a unique responsibility to preserve such a legacy. And what Storey also ignores is that this isn’t just about art. It’s not that people would stop giving art to Brandeis–who cares, if there’s no place left to put it–the point is that people would stop giving anything (save money) to the university. No Judaica, no rare books, no period music instruments (Brandeis has a few)–nothing. “But that’s silly…Brandeis just sold art!” No–Brandeis sold something which was never given to it with the intention of it being sold. The fact that it possesses a monetary value is good for insurance purposes, for calculating Brandeis’s total assets against which it can take loans and the like, but it was never intended to be valued so it could be sold when the time was right (or in this case, wrong). No donor in his / her right mind will ever give anything of this kind to Brandeis again when it has proven it can’t be trusted to maintain and not sell such items when it screwed up and is getting desperate, and I think there’s little doubt that this was one of the major reasons Brandeis backed off this past week.
3. Finally, I find Storey’s argument about the Brandeis’s administration to be, well, laughable….call it the OMG BRANDEIS’S ADMINISTRATION WOULD NEVER MAKE A BAD DECISION!!!11!!!! argument. I continue to be mystifed at what gave Storey this warm and fuzzy feeling about the administration, but I’ll just put it this way: Brandeis could have done much, MUCH more–as Jehuda himself admitted–to bring people into the process (and I’m sorry, it’s not enough to say “but people would have said NO!” The answer to that is not to ignore said people. The answer is to do a better job of convincing them–by, say, showing actual facts and figures rather than coming up with a decision that utterly excludes every affected party, including the museum itself . I’m particularly amused that Storey, a resident of California which is in love with sending every decision to a vote by the population of his entire freaking state, is making this argument.). When it didn’t do this, it badly hurt its credibility. Do I think it intended to destroy the school’s reputation? No. I think a bunch of business people badly miscalculated the reaction to an ill-considered scheme, and made–as business people are often wont to do, reference Madoff, Bernie–a bad, short sighted move. No one is calling for the Board to be fired. They’re asking, instead, for other people besides the Board–like, you know, the university community which the Board governs and to which it is intended to answer–to be brought into the process. That is now finally starting to happen, albeit later than it should have.
Other than that, I think my major points still stand. The Rose was self-sustaining; its art was never intended to be sold, and selling it now in a down market would be an incredibly stupid financial decision; selling it would permanently ensure that nothing tangible besides money–nothing, not just art–would ever be donated again, or at least not for a very long time; and the administration, which botched this so badly, shouldn’t be trusted to handle this by itself again. Now is the time for all of Brandeis to make a decision collectively, and I’m glad it’s decided to do that. I hope it’ll maintain that far-sightedness in the future.
