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The Editorial of our Spring 2000 issue.
The importance of labels can hardly be overstated. In recent months the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has been in the news for the administrative changes initiated by the recently appointed director, Malcolm Rogers. These changes have involved the dismissal of two senior curators and numerous other staff members. They have also led to the consolidation of several departments, creating at least one incongruous combination. Rogers' approach, stressing popular access at the expense of scholarship, is not unique, but it is widely viewed as undermining the museum's reputation and denigrating its fine collections.
The consolidation that has most astonished observers has been the grafting of the museum's recently acquired African art collection onto its distinguished and venerable Asian department. Hilton Kramer in a vitriolic New York Observer article on Rogers' renovations describes this new merger as looking "like a new department of nonwhite civilization." For the record, it would be better to first give credit to the MFA for finally discovering African art a few years ago-one of the last major art museums in the U.S. to do so-thanks to the generosity and persistence of Mr. and Mrs. William Teel, donors of the African and Oceanic collection that now fills two galleries. Their gift was made under the previous administration and was accompanied by a partial endowment for a curatorship. The collection was installed under the supervision of assistant director Brendt Benjamin, who has since become director at the St. Louis Museum of Art, leaving the material administratively orphaned. In the recent consolidations, it has come temporarily under the wing of Wu Tung, curator of Asian art, who notes that he is "baby sitting" it until things settle down and enough funds can be raised to launch a dedicated department.
Another bizarre juxtaposition relates to the museum's small but fine collection of Native American art. The individual responsible for the formation of this collection was Jonathan Fairbanks, curator of American decorative arts, who felt that the material was an important adjunct to his primary collection. He was dismissed in the restructuring, and both American decorative arts and Native American art were swept together with American painting, New World antiquities, and some other odds and ends into a new and bafflingly consolidated department labeled "Art of the Americas." Whether this material stays here or whether it eventually becomes part of a future department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas familiar to many institutions depends upon the qualifications of the individual ultimately chosen to curate the African and Oceanic collection.
In a related dilemma, Sotheby's was apparently also puzzled about where to put African and Oceanic art on its new web site. During the first few months of operation of its on-line auction, African art could most readily be found by clicking "Other" under "Furniture and Decorative Arts." A specific search for "African art" turned up a random collection of African art and extraneous objects. It was also possible to find some of these pieces of African art by clicking "Other" on the first menu, and then "Other" a second time, which seems to be perpetuating nineteenth century attitudes a bit longer than necessary. The director of on-line operations for Sotheby's acknowledges that at the outset the category structure for Ancient, African, Oceanic, Pre-Columbian, and Native American art was "atrocious" and he promises "a complete revamping of the category structure" as the "number one" priority, with change to occur "hopefully, by this spring." Perhaps to make amends, a theme sale of Oceanic art titled "Exploring the South Pacific" will be launched in the next few months-unless in the face of the investigations brewing in the U.S., E.E.U., and Australia as we go to press, the powers that be have other things in mind.
Jonathan Fogel
