THEY TOOK OUR MONEY AND THEN OUR STORIES

…But the first person I ran into at Christie’s was an executive from the Guggenheim, who insisted that not everyone was in trouble. “We were just saying, mid-sized museums are doing just fine,” she said, indicating a colleague from the Morgan Library. Sure, places like the Met and MoMA need to spin their turnstiles millions of times a year to make budget, she said, but her museum and others, which can only fit a few thousand people a day anyway, are better positioned for the Great Cash Evaporation (Tourist Extinction Edition). …

….I want to hear the Citibank CEO Vikram Pandit rattle off the definition of iambic pentameter, and tell me why Abstract Expressionism was a leap forward, and what he thinks about Conceptualism. And while he takes another $10-billion to help prevent Citigroup from crumbling, I want him to explain to the U.S. Congress why they need to expand the annual appropriation of the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts beyond a pathetic $150-million….Read More.