by Richard Gleaves

Robin Pogrebin of the New York Times writes fascinatingly of a new service offered by the Bank of America: turnkey art shows, precurated for convenience, and offered at little or no cost to cash-strapped museums.

Among the choice revelations:

• BofA's corporate art collection of more than 60,000 works was assembled not by collecting art but by collecting other banks with art collections.

• After considering selling off the collection, BofA realized they could make more money packaging it as art shows, which serve as effective marketing tools for creating new business.

• MOMA-level museums won't touch corporate shows unless the work is donated to the museum. Rationale: the space outranks the work, so showing the work in the space would increase the value of the work.

• Small regional museums, on the other hand, are embracing the corporate shows. Rationale: the work outranks the space, so showing the work in the space increases the value of the space. And in bad economic times the shows are lifesavers.
  

Tellingly, BofA initially hoped to place the shows in high-end museums, but eventually realized the smaller venues were their target demographic. Said a BofA spokesperson, “Smaller community museums with more need began to ask for our program. They just don’t have the deep pockets, and they don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘We don’t do corporate collections,’ nor do they frankly have the snobbery about it.”

And here's a quote from the director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, which has one of the BofA shows scheduled for exhibition: “There are people in the art field who think that somehow businessmen are evil, and you shouldn’t deal with them, but they have no trouble taking their money. I’ve always thought that was the ultimate hypocrisy. You almost can’t do a contemporary art show without borrowing from some gallery, and those paintings are for sale."