MATTERS OF CONSCIENCE AND CONSEQUENCE
According to a recent report, in 2009 the U.S. experienced a 2.4% decline in culture related donations. But halfway through 2010, things are looking up. Bellevue, Washington’s Performing Arts Center Eastside became the recipient of a $25 million gift from the Tateuchi Foundation—the third largest single donation to an arts institute since 2007. Over in France, censorship seems to be on the rise. A group exhibit of erotic art scheduled for the Bibliothèque départementale de la Somme in Amiens, France was prevented from opening by Christian Manable, a French Socialist and president of the general counsel. Manable objected on the grounds that such work was unsuitable for a library supported by public funding. And The Getty Museum faces objections of its own, from an Armenian Apolistic church in La Crescenta. The church claims that the museum illegally purchased seven pages ripped from a sacred thirteenth-century Bible during the Armenian genocide. The Getty acquired the pages in 1994. Artist and filmmaker Daryush Shokof, an exiled Iranian living in Berlin, was kidnapped and held for two weeks by four Arabic-speaking man who threatened to kill him based on a film he made that criticizes the Iranian regime. Another filmmaker is in trouble in Virginia, where photographer Anne Pearse-Hocker is suing Firelight Media and the Smithsonian for $450,000, claiming that the 2008 PBS documentary “We Shall Remain: Wounded Knee” used her 1973 photographs without permission or credit. One of the companies owned by Thomas Kincaid, America’s most collected living artist, filed for bankruptcy protection after failing to pay $1 million awarded to gallery owners from an earlier settlement. The gallery owners sued the artist and his company for fraudulently using his Christian faith to coerce them into an unsound investment. As Poland’s National Museum prepares to open an exhibit of homoerotic art in conjunction with the Euro Pride parade, a number of politicians, journalists, historians and artists are protesting the show. Finally, Brandeis University’s troubled Rose Museum is exploring a new model to keep itself financially viable—renting out art.
