Michael Kinsley, a native Detroiter and graduate of Cranbrook and Harvard, has a novel suggestion for what to do with the Detroit Institute of Arts amid the city's bankruptcy case. He notes in The New Republic, where he is editor-at-large, that the prevailing opinion is "to even think about selling works of art from the museum to pay Detroit’s debts would be about as philistine as you can get. Case closed."
Kinsey writes:
As a native Detroiter, I hope the art institute gets to keep its collection intact. But I’d like to see a bit more deliberation before everyone sinks into that high-minded conclusion. After all, the city owes mostly blameless investors some $18 billion. If it’s going to stiff these people, aren’t there more important assets to preserve? How about the neonatal unit at the city hospital? Art is important, but should it trump saving babies’ lives?
By not thinking outside the box, Detroit is losing an ideal opportunity to test a suggestion made three decades ago by a curmudgeonly Harvard political scientist named Edward Banfield. Banfield wrote a book called The Democratic Muse, in which he proposed that paintings and sculptures in public museums be sold and replaced by high-quality reproductions. Most museum visitors, he argued, couldn’t tell the difference (I certainly couldn’t) and thus would get the same experience from the fakes as they would from the originals. You can take this logic even further. Who needs a perfect reproduction, or even a good one? Most people’s appreciation of art doesn’t come from seeing original works in museums. It comes from posters or postcards or beach towels or t-shirts. Museums themselves sell these things. They bring pleasure to people. There must be some aesthetic value even in these crude artifacts.
Should Detroit sell its art? Kinsley doesn't provide an opinion on that hot issue. "However much it might mak sense in the abstract, it's just too radical and too humiliating a step.
He concludes:
Unless, of course, it can be done secretly. Just pick a few of the most valuable paintings in their collection, hire Qian or others like him to produce fakes, and sell the real ones to those Russian businessmen The New York Times dislikes so much. Make the switcheroo late one night, pay off your debts in the morning. If anyone asks Detroit where it got the money all of a sudden, city officials can just say something vague about building cars.
