In a surprise appointment last month, Sotheby’s named Richard Oldenburg, former director of the Museum of Modern Art, to be chairman of Sotheby’s America. Mr Oldenburg, sixty-one, had been MoMA’s director since 1972.
Mr Oldenburg replaces John Marion, who retired at the end of last year from a thirty-five year career in the auction business. Marion now holds the title of Sotheby’s Honorary Chairman.
While some eyebrows were raised at the passage of a museum official of Mr Oldenburg’s position to the trade, such a move is not unprecedented. Perry Rathbone, former director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, spent more than a decade at Christie’s after leaving that museum.
Oldenburg has never conducted an auction, nor did he initiate acquisitions of art for MoMA, and he is not expected to preside over sales at Sotheby’s. Officials of the auction house cited the former museum official’s experience, credibility and wide field of contacts as reasons for his appointment. Dealers expect Oldenburg to bring additional weight to the firm, which has lost its top contemporary art specialists (and some of their clients) over the past year.
On his second day at the job last month, Mr Oldenburg was occupying a third-floor office at Sotheby’s New York headquarters. Perhaps in honour of his former institution, a Léger was hanging across from his desk and a Miró oil on paper behind it, but not for long. Both are for sale. We spoke to him about his career change.
How did this job come about?
I’d been thinking about a number of different things that I might do after leaving the museum. I’d been approached for other possible museum jobs, a lot of them outside New York. I was also doing some consulting on a possible course at Harvard on museum management, and I had one major commitment, to set off for Russia for a month to advise the State Russian Museum.
Just shortly before I left for St Petersburg, I was approached regarding the possibility of talking to Sotheby’s. It seemed interesting, but very different from what I’d planned to do. I sat in Russia for five weeks, and somehow over those five weeks it seemed like a more interesting idea to me. Now I’m very happy and pleased with the decision. I’m also happy to be in New York and involved in the art world. The cast is, of course, the same. It’s just a different position within the large circle.
Were you asked to take the directorship at the Andy Warhol Museum?
Absolutely not.
You observed that your new position involves “the same cast of characters”. How much of a transition is this move? Sotheby’s is a business, after all, not a museum.
Obviously, you’re still dealing with many of the same collectors. Very often, some of the people who are the major donors to museums are also people who are making exchanges in their own collections, selling works and buying works. The museum relationship with the auction houses is also close, not only in terms of occasionally selling works or buying works, but also with museum services. For example, the auction houses provide very great help to museums in appraisals for insurance purposes and they also make direct contributions for educational programs. It’s a world where all of them are parts that fit together into a whole and I don’t see any conflicts between them. Yes, of course, it’s a business, but alas, to a considerable degree museums are a business now, too, when you’re worrying about everything from attendance to membership, to corporate sponsorship. The techniques, goals and means aren’t that different.
What particular goals do you have here? Is there anything in particular that you want to accomplish at Sotheby’s?
I know it’s a cliché, but there are very few things in life that are more fun than learning a lot of new things. That’s what this gives me an opportunity to do, which I wouldn’t have had if I had moved to another museum. So a large part of this world is going to be very new to me. Some of the areas that I’ve been particularly asked to involve myself with are of special interest to me, for example the educational studies program. As you know, Sotheby’s has a very extensive program of courses, lectures, and symposia which I think do a real service to the art world. Another area would be museum services.
Looking at art that has been sold by museums such as the Guggenheim and the New York Historical Society, it seems that Sotheby’s has had an advantage over other auction houses. When museums do sell art, a lot of that art seems to come to Sotheby’s. In the event that museums decide to sell works from their collections, do you expect to have a role in bringing that art to Sotheby’s?
Of course. It’s Sotheby’s hope, and mine too, that the relationships I have with museums and collectors will encourage people to come to Sotheby’s. I think that it’s also true that there’s a long and positive record of Sotheby’s dealing with museums and very successfully selling their works.
Do you think that there’s going to be more deaccessioning coming up?
As far as the general picture is concerned, I don’t see any reason why there should be more or less than what’s been going on. The major concern among art museums was not deaccessioning. It was the use of the funds when the works were sold, and we in the art museum world have maintained that the only proper response was to acquire for the collection, which in general is observed. But obviously the auction house, which is the middle man in that, doesn’t prescribe the goals for what happens with the proceeds.
Will you be working mostly with twentieth-century art and art in the United States?
My theoretical responsibility is Sotheby’s America, but my portfolio is really spread across the whole business. It stands to reason that the area I’m most familiar with [modern art] is one that I’ll be called on for more than another area. But I don’t have the direct responsibility for that particular department.
Were you particularly involved in acquiring any one area of art for MoMA?
As you know, the structure of MoMA is collegial, and the curatorial departments are independent. You have the chief curators in each area who determine the programs they have for collecting. My interests were pretty eclectic, because one of the joys of being director was that I attended all the acquisitions meetings for all the departments. I could see what was being done in photography and I could see what was being done in painting and sculpture, from the phenomenal acquisition of the van Gogh “Portrait of the Postman Roulin” to acquiring the first work of a younger artist.
Do you find that some people in the museum world still feel uncomfortable in the world of the auction houses or have a lingering prejudice against it?
I don’t think that prejudice really exists. A lot of the assumption that it does goes back quite a few years, to a world when museums were scholarly refuges, areas of connoisseurship for which there wasn’t a big public. It was a very different world, in which you had the temple of art, and the rest was the crass world of commerce. The fusion that we’ve seen in the last twenty years is not only the auction houses: it’s also the tremendous growth of galleries, the emergence of great dealers in contemporary art, just as there were great dealers in the era of modern art. I think that the whole art world is fused to a great degree and I don’t think that’s been bad for anyone. It’s been very pleasing to me to have so many responses from my colleagues who have written to me congratulating me on this job. No one so far has said to me, “How could you go into the trade?”
You headed one of the world’s great museums for more than twenty years. Is there any advice you could give in a general way to museum boards of trustees looking for directors now?
It is becoming so complicated right now to be a director. In addition, boards are changing so that there are people who don’t necessarily have that long commitment to a particular institution or a single family and there is a tendency among trustees to think, “Let’s get a professional manager in to run this”, in an abdication of a lot of their roles. Too often they think that by simply appointing that person they can abdicate their fund-raising, as well. That’s impossible. I think that’s a very dangerous thing for a host of reasons. Most dangerous of all is that it eventually confuses what museums are really about. They’re about art. They’re not about being well run: not that they shouldn’t be, but that’s not their goal.
The other side of the problem is not a trustee problem. Because directorship has become such a demanding job, it almost precludes serious scholarship, or work with exhibitions, or art as a whole. It’s become less and less attractive to art historians. What we’re grappling with [in designing a program at Harvard] is how we can encourage people who have gone into the museum world because of a real dedication to art to accept the responsibility of running these institutions. Because if they don’t, they’re going to be accepting that the institutions will be run by people with less of a commitment to the arts, and they’ll be working for them. The challenge is to make the directorship the job that shows that art is the primary function of the museum. In doing this we should perhaps relieve the director of some of the responsibilities by creating a management structure below him or her, rather than above.
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as 'Is there life after moma?'