the layover philadelphia the barnes foundation torrent

Francis, Vermeer’s laughing girl-free of the trappings of Henry Clay Frick’s robber-baron lifestyle?” “But who wouldn’t enjoy seeing some of the Frick’s great paintings-Bellini’s St. “Many have compared the Barnes relocation to dismantling the Frick Collection and moving it up the street to the Met,” she wrote. Roberta Smith, a writer on art for The New York Times, epitomized the reigning sensibility in an article celebrating Judge Ott’s decision. Anything that opposes this force is dismissed as “elitist,” “idiosyncratic,” “out-of-touch,” or just plain reactionary. “Access” is the code-word but “box-office receipts” names the real goal. Restaurants, gift shops, tours for schoolchildren, parties and receptions and fund-raising events. Every urban center must have its “arts complex,” and every arts complex must be basically the same (apart, of course, from such incidentals as the contents of the collection). Hence, homogeneity is the order of the day. What is wanted is art that appeals to and can be disseminated to as many people as possible. We live at a moment when art is more and more exploited as a commercial resource: a lever to boost “urban renewal” and enhance city coffers and social-cultural pretensions. The cultural moral has to do with the perils of individuality. The story forms a cautionary tale, with two sets of morals: one cultural, the other practical or prudential. The fact that the indignity might well have become inevitable-largely, we think, because the Barnes Foundation has been grossly mismanaged for more than a decade -only adds insult to the injury.Īs long-time readers of The New Criterion know, we have several times had occasion to reflect on the tangled history of the Barnes Foundation (see, for example, Roger Kimball’s “Betraying a Legacy: The Case of the Barnes Foundation” in our June 1993 issue). In an editorial on the decision, The New York Times called Judge Ott’s decision “an act of judicial common sense.” In our view, it was an act of judicial usurpation, the final-or at any rate the latest-indignity for an institution that has struggled mightily since Barnes’s death in 1951 to preserve its independence, curatorial as well as financial. Last month, Judge Stanley Ott approved a request by the trustees of the Barnes Foundation to move most of the school’s $6-billion collection of art to downtown Philadelphia where it could be more effective fodder for tourists. Barnes founded in the 1920s in Merion, Pennsylvania, a plush suburb of Philadelphia. It is last-act time for the Barnes Foundation, the art school that the pharmaceutical magnate Albert C.

The layover philadelphia the barnes foundation torrent