Nov 25, 2025

Welcome back to Wall Power. I’m Marion Maneker.

Deaccessioning—whereby museums sell art, usually to fund the purchase of more art—is a wildly misunderstood necessity. The institutions often take a beating for it in the press. They sold what?! Cue the outrage. True, sometimes a museum has been mismanaged and sells its art in a last-ditch hope to save the institution, in which case such criticism is valid. But all too often, when a museum wants to sell art for good reasons—to reorient its mission, say, or to offload a surfeit of works by one artist or movement in order to acquire less represented works—there is a grandstanding, finger-pointing show of defiance aided and abetted by clickbait coverage. Last week, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., got thoroughly dragged for its meticulous plan to sell a few works collected by its founders, Duncan and Marjorie Phillips, to fund an acquisitions endowment. Tonight, I’m going to try to explain what I think is going on, and why the reaction has been so vehement and unfair to the museum and its director, Jonathan Binstock. 🚨 Before we get started, I wanted to thank all of you who stopped me during the auctions to say how much you enjoy Wall Power. It’s really appreciated. The goal here is to provide a clearinghouse of information among all of you, with Puck acting as an honest broker. But the compliments raise an interesting question: If you get this email forwarded to you and don’t already subscribe, why not get right with the Lord this holiday season and sign up here? (We also offer group subscriptions, so you can gift one to your whole firm.) Good information isn’t free, and your subscriptions make this newsletter possible. 📲 Also, I want to look ahead to the future of Wall Power’s coverage. I’m keen to get more voices into the newsletter, and that means I’d love to hear from anyone who has a pitch—including practitioners and industry professionals, as well as freelance writers and reporters with an interest in cultural property or the economic and social impact of museums. You can always reach me at Marion@puck.news or 917.825.1391 on WhatsApp, Signal, and SMS. Ping me and we’ll talk about your idea.

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Let’s get started…

Julie Brener Davich

Eastern promise: Sotheby’s sale of East Asian treasures from the Okada Museum of Art—which was held to settle the legal debts of the museum’s founder, Kazuo Okada—aimed to generate $54.6 million. Sotheby’s left that goal in the rearview mirror, exceeding expectations to make $88.4 million.The top lot was Kitagawa Utamaro’s 19th century hanging scroll Fukagawa in Snow, which made HK$55.3 million ($7.1 million), almost 10 times its HK$6 million estimate—a new record for the artist. Sotheby’s also set a record for an edition of Hokusai’s The Great Wave, which sold for HK$21.7 million ($2.8 million) against an estimate of just HK$5 million. As we’ve seen in the market for Chinese works of art, rare items with well-documented provenance tend to attract many bids. A bronze wine container, or fanglei, from the Ya Yi clan of the Shang dynasty, dating to around the 11th or 12th century B.C., sold for HK$38.8 million ($5 million)—almost 20 times its low estimate of HK$2 million. A similar vessel had not appeared at auction in a quarter-century, and most other examples are in museums. This one once belonged to the Japanese collector Wada Kyuzaemon. Meanwhile, items without provenance struggled. A large Ru Guanyao bowl from the Northern Song dynasty made only HK$13.8 million ($1.8 million), well below its estimate of HK$20 million. By comparison, a smaller Ru bowl with established provenance sold at Christie’s in 2018 for $7.2 million.

Now, let’s get to the main event…

Drain the Art Swamp

It’s not easy running an art museum: Trustees are tapped out, there’s pressure to keep admission accessible, and the boards are increasingly vocal. But when the Phillips Collection director decided to sell off a few works in order to commission some new ones, the art media showed their narrow-mindedness. Here’s what they got wrong.

Marion Maneker

You have to feel for Jonathan Binstock, who joined the Phillips Collection two and a half years ago as part of a new generation of directors leading museums around the country. Like Sasha Suda, who was recently defenestrated from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Binstock was charged with making his institution more relevant—a vibrant part of its community. So, with the full support of his board, he authored a strategic plan for the Washington, D.C., museum—one that emphasized “intellectual humility and social purpose,” “stewardship,” and “accessibility,” not to mention “authenticity, connection, and strengthening civil society.”

To achieve their goal, Binstock and his curators set out to commission new work for the museum, which began with a collection of 2,000 artworks acquired by Duncan and Marjorie Phillips a hundred years ago and has since grown to some 6,000. The hope is that significant works of art by recognized, well-established contemporary artists will bring in new audiences and help extend the unique philosophy and character of the Phillips Collection into the 21st century. Naturally, a program like that requires a war chest, so Binstock and his board decided to sell three works from among the thousands Phillips owns. Those works—one each by Georgia O’Keeffe, Georges Seurat, and Arthur Dove—raised $13 million at Sotheby’s last week, a not-insignificant chunk of the money that Binstock needs to support his mission. But you can’t please everybody—and that’s when the attacks began. Even though the museum has large holdings of works by Pierre Bonnard, Mark Rothko, Paul Klee, and Georges Braque—and a previous director had sold a Braque to fund acquisitions—Binstock chose to sell works with the most financial heft and the least lasting impact on the museum’s character and mission. Nevertheless, The Washington Post’s Sebastian Smee hit Binstock hard—once on the Friday before last week’s auction in New York and then with a follow-up story after the sales. Soon thereafter, The Wall Street Journal’s Eric Gibson piled on with a thundering mess of self-righteous confusion. All of this was merely a prelude to a New York Times drive-by over the weekend.

“A Gem Without Equal”?

The criticism was both histrionic and apocalyptic—and, strikingly, much of it came from inside the house. Smee quoted Liza Phillips, one of Duncan Phillips’s granddaughters, saying the works of art slated to be sold, including a Picasso coming this spring, were “integral to the character of the museum.” (Phillips is a trustee of the museum and also sits on the 11-person advisory board known as the “members.”) Eliza Rathbone, a former chief curator, was “deeply saddened and appalled” at the sales, which she felt would “irreparably mar the vision of the founder.” Former MoMA curator and Yale School of Art dean Robert Storr, a recent addition to the Phillips members, also put his oar in the water, calling the sales an “absurd gambit” and fixating on the Seurat drawing that sold for nearly $5 million as “a gem … without equal.”

For his part, Binstock offered his response to me today in a text exchange. “Duncan Phillips never intended his collection to be a ‘one of everything’ institution,” he wrote. “Instead, he encouraged and supported artists. By juxtaposing these voices in dialogue, he could spark conversations across different times and places.” In other words, the collection was meant to be eclectic and synthetic, not encyclopedic.

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The Seurat drawing is a case in point. It was the Phillipses’ only work on paper by the artist (they also have a small oil sketch on panel), but it was always something of a consolation prize, since Duncan Phillips had wanted to buy the Seurat painting that now hangs at the Met. In fact, Binstock, his curators, and the trustees chose to sell works that were outside the 500 core pieces defined by the founders’ son, Laughlin, in 1999. (As a compromise to the members who revolted just before the sale, Binstock agreed to expand the definition of the core collection to 2,000 works going forward.) Also, the Phillips Collection sold a couple of million dollars’ worth of art at Sotheby’s in May to no such outcry—although, notably, those had been donated by others rather than acquired by Duncan Phillips himself. So the objection here is to selling any work of art picked out by the founder, as if he were an infallible saint rather than a collector.

In retrospect, the Journal’s attack was probably the most egregious. Trying to channel Hilton Kramer, Gibson thundered that the Phillips was a “pilgrimage point” where one went to make “deep connections” through installations that “thoughtfully mixed artists, periods, and styles, the whole offering a mesmerizing glimpse into the eye and mind of a singular aesthete.” Of course, the Phillips is no such thing: It’s an institution meant to outlive its founders. It constantly rehangs its collection, mixing the 2,000 works Phillips himself bought with the 4,000 other works it owns. It hosts special exhibitions from other museums, and tries to introduce new artists from Washington and around the world. It also has to find a way to remain relevant to audiences or risk going the way of the Corcoran. That cautionary tale of an institution was dissolved in 2014, and its 17,000 works dispersed throughout the National Gallery of Art and other institutions. Worse than Gibson’s pomposity is his naivete. At the bottom of his screed he blithely announced that there was an “easy, have-it-both-ways solution”—the 35 trustees ought to be “good for a chunk” of the money needed to fund the new acquisitions and could just “hit up other potential donors” when tapped out. “This way,” Gibson concluded, “the museum gets its money and keeps its art.” And this is why arts editors are not museum directors.

Tapped-Out Trustees

Since Gibson managed to find the webpage where the 35 trustees are listed, he could have simply scrolled down to any of the museum’s 13 annual reports posted below that list. Had he done so, he would have seen clearly that gifts, grants, and corporate support already make up almost 46 percent of the museum’s annual revenue. A very large portion of that comes from the trustees. And whatever trustees and corporations cannot provide comes from the endowment. In other words, the financial supporters of the Phillips are already tapped out.

Talk to any museum director these days and they’ll tell you there’s a growing tension between the need to reach larger audiences by reducing admission fees, on one hand, and the need to earn income on the other. To close the gap, they’re increasingly having to fall back on the generosity of trustees. And whatever one thinks of the rich, this is one place where they’ve been doing their part—and then some. You would think Gibson would be cognizant of all of that. In fact, deaccessioning is a time-honored and fully validated means for raising money to acquire new art. When the works of art are sold, they don’t get burned in a conflagration of vulgar indecency. They simply move to another owner—outlasting their institutions, like the Corcoran. But in her quotes in The Washington Post, Liza Phillips complained that the works being sold last week “belong to the public” and now they were “probably going into private hands.” Phillips is deluding herself. The art owned by the National Gallery down on the Mall belongs to the public. Her grandfather’s art is owned by a private institution that merely has certain obligations to the public. More to the point, none of the works being sold are permanently on display at the Phillips, nor should they be. And the buyers, who are paying a lot of money for these works, are just as likely to be good stewards of the art as any institution. After all, people take care of valuable stuff. And there’s no reason to believe that any private buyer of the O’Keeffe, Dove, or Seurat works won’t be a generous lender to museum shows, maybe lending the works to a museum long-term or even ultimately donating them. That’s the circle of life in the art world.

I’ve gone on too long about all of this. It’s a pet peeve of mine, this acting like art is damaged or destroyed by being bought and sold. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

More on museums tomorrow in the Inner Circle, where we’ll have a conversation between the Brooklyn Museum’s Anne Pasternak and the Whitney’s Scott Rothkopf from The Art of Influence. Make sure you’ve upgraded to read it. M

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