Welcome back to Wall Power. I’m Marion Maneker.
While I was away
on vacation, MAGA launched its attack on museums, with the White House announcing that it would be reviewing exhibitions at the Smithsonian’s institutions for “fairness.” It’s no secret that art and museums, like elite universities, have been at the forefront of cultural battles over diversity, equity, and inclusion. Until recently, many conservative collectors were happy to participate in this trend, even if it meant getting attacked by some of the artists whose works they were helping to
support or promote.
It’s too soon for MAGA’s attacks on museums to have had a real effect on the content of exhibitions—remember, it takes years for these shows to come together—but since I’ve just come back from a tour of five fairly representative museums in the hinterland, I thought we might use this as an opportunity to explore the phenomenon and its future implications. I’ll get into that below.
But first… |
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The M.J.-Kobe card makes a new auction record: Last night, the one-of-a-kind Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant Dual Logoman Autograph card sold for $12.9
million at Heritage Auctions, taking the crown for most expensive sports card ever sold at auction. The previous record was $12.6 million, set three years ago, by a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card, also at
Heritage. This new record feels symbolic of the larger generational shift in collecting, as a pair of stars from the ’90s and aughts snatched the record from a sports figure beloved by a previous generation.
Heritage used the extended bid format, wherein auctions open for proxy bidding for a couple of weeks with a finite end time—in this case, 10 p.m. CT last night. At that point, bidders who have placed proxy bids are qualified to participate in extended bidding. Each time someone places
a bid during the extended bidding period, another 30 minutes is added to the clock. Among other things, the format prevents a bidder from snagging a top lot at the last moment. When proxy bidding ended last night, the M.J.-Kobe Dual Logoman was at $7 million, with Heritage’s 22 percent buyer’s premium included; two and a half hours later, it closed at $12.9 million.
Basketball memorabilia, in general, is rising in popularity and prominence. Last night, an 8-foot-square centerpiece of the
Bulls home court from 1994-1998, with a 3-foot-wide Jordan autograph, sold for $562,555, surpassing its $500,000 estimate. (Alas, a 1986 Fleer Jordan rookie
card, graded 10/10, fell short of expectations, selling for just $463,600 against an estimate of $800,000.) A 1961 Fleer Wilt Chamberlain Philadelphia Warriors rookie
card sold for $976,000, shy of its $1 million estimate. The second session of the auction, featuring 1,276 more lots, at estimates up to $100,000 for LeBron James’s L.A. Lakers
locker, ends its proxy bidding session tonight.
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A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR |
While many collectors dream of passing their art on to the next generation, tax implications, differing tastes
and the costs of maintaining a collection can complicate a well-intentioned — and sometimes emotionally charged — gift. Explore our guide for valuing, appraising and transferring your collection to ensure the pieces you spent decades collecting live on as you intended. Explore Our Guide |
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The Babe bear market: After the Jordan-Kobe card, the second-most-expensive lot of the Heritage sale was Mickey Mantle’s game-worn Yankees jersey from 1960, signed “Mickey Mantle No. 7” on
the front, which sold for $5.2 million against an estimate of $4 million. Surviving jerseys from this period are rare because they were usually sent down to the minors after one season of use (the jerseys typically bore the players’ number, but not their last name). A signed 1952 Topps Mantle
card—the holy grail of sports card collecting—also sold for $1.07 million, well above its $600,000 estimate.
Last summer, Heritage set the record for sports memorabilia when they sold Babe Ruth’s “called shot”
jersey, from the 1932 World Series, for $24.1 million. But overall, Babe memorabilia seems to be experiencing a downturn. Last night, a 1916 Boston Red Sox rookie
card made only $1.4 million, well below its $2 million estimate. One of the eight unsold items in the 150-lot auction was Ruth’s 1923 World Championship gold
pocketwatch (rings didn’t become standard until a decade later). It last sold at auction in 2014 for $717,000, and was expected to make at least $3 million this time around, but didn’t meet its $1.8 million reserve.
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In our post-monocultural attention-deficit age, museums have attempted to curate
more shows, often highlighting lesser-known artists. In fact, this isn’t wokeism or tokenism at all, but rather a way for institutions to gel with their local communities. |
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There’s a lot going on in our nation’s museums. In spite of the headlines you’re reading coming out
of Washington, the president’s ability to shape the narrative of what art gets seen, and which interpretation of history is presented, is actually quite limited. After all, the federal government may fund the nation’s museums in the capital, but it provides little support for the many museums, large and small, that dot the major cities and cultural centers around the country. And though museums have been—and likely will continue to be—at the center of debates over so-called “wokeism,” the
president has little leverage over these institutions beyond inciting public opinion, which is no small thing.
The art world, on the other hand, thinks that it is merely reflecting and representing the American population back to itself through art. Sure, that includes some overheated academic language at times. And it can be tone-deaf, grating, and off-putting. But that is where the vulnerability of these institutions comes from—not from the federal government, which doesn’t give museums
money. The audience that matters are the donors, trustees, and the paying public. We’ll see changes in curation and acquisitions only if these constituencies turn against museums.
With that issue hovering in the background like ambient noise, the Wallpowers set out last Monday morning to drive to Waterville, Maine, to see the Gertrude Abercrombie show co-organized by the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and the Colby College Museum. Between New York and Waterville, there are a number of museums that are well worth visiting. For this trip, I had planned to stop at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and Institute of Contemporary Art. While in Maine, in addition to hitting Colby’s campus, I wanted to stop in at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland. Finally, we had to drop the junior Wallpower in the Pioneer Valley of central
Massachusetts, which would allow us to stop in at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, on the way home. |
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A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR |
While many collectors dream of passing their art on to the next generation, tax implications, differing tastes
and the costs of maintaining a collection can complicate a well-intentioned — and sometimes emotionally charged — gift. Explore our guide for valuing, appraising and transferring your collection to ensure the pieces you spent decades collecting live on as you intended. Explore Our Guide |
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There’s a lot to say about these museum shows, and the museums’ permanent collections, so I’m going
to break this into two parts. Tonight, we’re going to talk about our visit to Boston. On Tuesday, we’ll tackle Maine and Connecticut. |
When we bought our tickets to the Boston MFA, we were asked whether we wanted to pay the extra fee
for the Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits show. I hesitated while I tried to count, from recent memory, how many ticketed, special exhibitions of van Gogh’s work Mrs. Wallpower and I have seen in the past two years. There was The Met’s interesting show in 2023, which reunited all 24 of the artist’s landscapes that feature his swirling cypress trees. That same year, we also saw the Musée d’Orsay’s astonishing show assembled from the 74 paintings and 33 drawings that
the melancholic patient made while trying to treat his mental illness in the final two months of his life at Auvers-sur-Oise. Then, late last year, the National Gallery in London put together its blockbuster 200th anniversary show that many experts told us was unparalleled in its number of hard-to-get loans.
Did we really need to see another van Gogh show? No. Were we going to pass up the opportunity to see more van Gogh, even though we’d seen so much so recently? Again, no. And
that tells you why these kinds of shows take place with such frequency. They’re crowd-pleasers and revenue generators. (There was a knitted van Gogh–themed Miffy doll in the gift shop.) They’re also the furthest thing from woke that a museum could stage these days. (Though it wouldn’t be hard to spin any van Gogh show as a paean to those suffering from mental illness. Just saying.) My point, of course, is that woke is in the eye of the beholder.
The Boston MFA show, itself, was
quite good, and it leaned heavily on its organizing thesis. Some Frans Hals paintings were gathered at the beginning, because van Gogh admired his portraiture, but they were quickly forgotten. Early on, we got to see the large-scale and impressive Postman Joseph Roulin, from 1888, which is part of the museum’s collection. And then there was The Yellow House (The Street), also from 1888, borrowed from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which gave the museum the
excuse to create a physical mock-up of the building where van Gogh worked for a time with Paul Gauguin. The MFA also featured two of the five versions of La Berceuse the artist made. This image is a portrait of Madame Roulin seated in a chair holding a rope, meant to signify a cradle out of view, as well as a clue to the title, which translates to “the lullaby.”
The great thing about a blockbuster show like this, which was clearly intended to
feature the Boston MFA’s own works—thereby offering the museum, and its patrons and members, a shot of local pride and relevance—was that viewers could come away with their own discoveries. For me, those were van Gogh’s own pen-and-ink copy of his portrait of the postman, Joseph; the two vibrantly colored versions of Camille Roulin in a blue cap and green coat with red button, set against a yellow background; and a late religious painting.
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As we left the van Gogh exhibition, we wended our way through the permanent collection of Mayan
pottery, with its intricate depictions of court life, and stumbled upon a show of work by Minnie Evans, an American folk artist. Evans, who only began to draw and paint at age 43, but lived to 95, is the kind of artist you might assume would upset the MAGA folks. She was a self-taught artist, without a pedigree, featured in a major museum. Where are the standards?, you could hear them cry. But if the Trump administration
wants museums to offer an “uplifting” version of American history and “remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage,” why wouldn’t we include Minnie Evans? Her story—a domestic worker who became an artist—is a classic Horatio Alger tale. And the public seems to agree.
We also took the time to see some of
the exceptional works in the permanent collection. Our junior Wallpower is a big fan of surrealism, especially the women surrealists, hence the trip to see the Abercrombie show, so we went upstairs to check out the MFA’s great Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington works. As we approached the gallery, we had to pass through an exhibition that featured John Singleton Copley’s famous Watson and the Shark. You know the painting I mean—a boat
full of men are about to pull a naked figure from the water as a menacing shark lunges for him. A prominent figure in the center of the boat is a Black man. Many art historians have made reference to this figure as one of the most important depictions of a Black man in 18th century art. The painting is part of an exhibition, Deep Waters: Four Artists and the Sea, centered on the artist John Akomfrah, that also includes J.M.W. Turner’s
Slave Ship, which depicts the true story of a slaver caught in a storm, throwing bodies of dead and dying slaves overboard so the captain could collect insurance money on those “lost at sea.” |
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Even though the Boston MFA has imaginatively juxtaposed works in other galleries—such as a Native
American beaded dress among contemporary depictions of the American West, and Chinese export goods in a room of paintings of American trading ships headed to the Far East—Akomfrah’s contextualism seems to be the very thing that would upset the MAGA movement. Will these kinds of special exhibitions still be museum features in two or three years? |
Over by the harbor, set amid an extensively redeveloped neighborhood, the Institute of Contemporary
Art sits cantilevered over the water’s edge. Last summer, when we made a pilgrimage to Buffalo’s AKG, we just missed the Stanley Whitney retrospective, How High the Moon. The high cost of shipping and insurance has changed the way museum loans work, so that shows travel more slowly to multiple institutions. Whitney’s work went on to the Walker in Minneapolis before arriving at the ICA in the spring, where it’s on view until September 1. We were lucky to catch it in the
last few weeks of the show.
Trained at Yale, where he was friends with Barkley Hendricks, Whitney took a while to find his signature style. But once he did, around the year 2002, he stuck with it. An abstract painter, Whitney simplified his work to a format of square canvases divided into four rows, each separated into colored panels containing different hues, textures, and brush strokes. The power of Whitney’s work comes from its simplicity and variation. Think of
Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square series, even though Whitney’s work is nothing like that.
With so much color in each painting, and so many similarly formatted paintings in close proximity—Whitney kept to the square format but played with size, ranging from dominating to intimate scales—it was easy to get overwhelmed by the riot of color, and lose your focus and discrimination. I would have liked to have spent more time with each of the works on their own,
rather than in a room of so many at once. Nevertheless, the show was curated with real skill and expertise: The vitrines of sketchbooks added a lot to understanding what Whitney was up to, and the wall of his many different works on paper, which opens the show, was satisfying and sublime. This was the kind of show to visit again and again, seeing something different each time, if you’re lucky enough to live in one of the cities where it was in residence.
On our way out, I stopped into the
ICA’s screening of Christian Marclay’s Doors, a recent work from 2022 that follows the structure of the artist’s famous 2010 work, The Clock. This past winter, MoMA had been showing The Clock, and I stopped in on several occasions, trying to take that 24-hour work in smaller hour-or-two doses. Although the clock is synchronized so that a clip appears onscreen each minute to coincide with the real time, the true power of the artwork is Marclay’s
editing. He presents a number of other narrative moments within the interstitial non-clock clips that provide context around the time of day, and create narrative drive.
In Doors, Marclay is freed from the clock conceit. That unleashes his real talents, and we see some clips repeated as variations. (It’s a great pairing with the Stanley Whitney show.) Marclay’s work doesn’t have to be seen in full. Stepping into a Marclay film is a bit like jumping on an amusement park ride. Time
stops. You focus on what’s about to happen next, and then, when it’s over, or you’ve had your fill, you leave. It’s art as mood cleanser.
And I left Boston refreshed. A good museum makes you feel like it’s a place you want to belong and return to, not just for that one special exhibition. But visiting a big museum like Boston’s MFA can leave you a bit exhausted and maybe a little overwhelmed. There’s too much to see, and yet you feel like you haven’t seen enough. In their efforts to
attract visitors, these museums have created many more small shows that either highlight works by lesser-known artists, or make works from the past more relevant to contemporary audiences. Unfortunately, these are the shows that will most likely become a focal point if the MAGA campaign gains traction beyond the Smithsonian. These exhibitions help create deeper connections to the museum’s core audience: its local community. That’s the purpose, not a woke agenda. In the coming years, we
will see whether those communities can sustain their museums in a climate of intimidation. |
More on this—as well as Gertrude Abercrombie, Alex Katz, Ann
Craven, and many more artists—on Tuesday. If you are up early tomorrow, check The New Yorker’s website for Sam Knight’s take on Patrick Drahi and Sotheby’s. That’s one we’re all likely to be talking about all week.
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