More Quick Talk: With SFMOMA's Neal Benezra

Indigo Blue, Ann Hamilton, 1991/2007 — Photo: SFMOMA

Here's a bit more of my conversation a few weeks ago with SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra.

LACAYO: The art market, of course, has been going off the charts. What's been the impact on your ability to collect? Museums get most of their art by way of gifts and bequests. But they also purchase.

BENEZRA: That's changed. We used to shop. Now it's impossible.

LACAYO: All the same, you spent about $2.1 million last year on acquisitions, which would be almost ten percent of your operating budget if it were counted as part of that budget, though it's not.

BENEZRA: We get that money partly through the acquisitions committee. If you're a member of the museum at a certain level you can join that committee. You pay an annual amount that creates a budget of about $1 million for our overall acquisition program. Each department also has separate committees that raise additional money.

Also, Phyllis Wattis, our great benefactor, when she died, left money to establish an acquisitions budget for painting and sculpture. We have not used any of that money yet. That will be our first serious endowment fund.

LACAYO: Madeleine Grynsztejn, your senior curator of painting and sculpture, just arranged the purchase this summer of Indigo Blue, a sizable Ann Hamilton that's now on display in your permanent galleries. But Hamilton is a living artist, with prices that are lower than Pollock's or Miro's. Can you shop in the market for 20th century modern art, as opposed to contemporary?

BENEZRA: It used to be that museum people could go to an art fair and compete. Now we're much more in the job there of advising our collectors, to advise them to buy certain pieces that we hope will come our way.

LACAYO: Everybody complains about the change in the federal tax laws governing fractional gifts. [This is an arrangement whereby collectors give a museum a partial ownership interest in a work, with the right to display the work for a part of each year, while the collector takes a partial tax break.] Has that had a big impact on you?

BENEZRA: We have more fractional gifts than any museum in the country, something like 800. That change has had an unbelievably negative impact on our acquisition program, a profoundly negative impact. The difference in the number of gifts from one year to the next has dropped off by 80% or something.

LACAYO: What about deaccessioning? Is that part of what you do? Or maybe you don't feel you have that many things worth getting rid of.

BENEZRA: Oh, we do. I came here from the Hirshhorn, where we had a very active deaccessioning program. I know that deaccessioning is the third rail of American museums. You have to be very careful how you do things. But I've seen how it can be done well.

LACAYO: Have you done any in the last year?

BENEZRA: Yes. We don't deaccession anything by living artists. What we have been deaccessioning are things from outside the scope of our collection, 19th century work, and things of such low quality that they just were not being seen in the galleries. It's a significant number of objects, but they're not major objects. I think we may have deaccessioned one Matisse drawing last year, because it was just not up to our standards and we have significant holdings in Matisse. The things that we've been deaccessioning are not newsworthy.