Museums Meet Auction Houses

Until recently, museums and auction houses were–and were perceived to be–opposite sorts of institutions, their values so different as to preclude cross-fertilization. Museum curators and directors concerned themselves mostly with aesthetic values, scholarship and the life of the mind. When the value of a work of art was discussed, it was usually in terms of its historical importance. Museum people regarded the commercial art world–as a museum director once put it to me only half in jest–as “the dark side,” a realm inimical to their values.

Auctioneers, by contrast, were all about money. “Value” to them was dollars and cents. Historical importance was of interest only to the extent that it could increase an object’s sale price. Given this oil-and-water relationship, there was no question of someone from an auction house going to work at a museum, just as it was equally unheard of for traffic to go in the other direction.

But in the past decade or so the wall between museums and auction houses has become porous. Museums, for example, are now more commercial, greatly expanding their retail operations, renting out parts of their collections and staging exhibitions–such as the Guggenheim’s own 2001 Giorgio Armani show–that seemed more promotional than scholarly.

And far from being loath to put a price tag on their treasures, museums nowadays can hardly wait to do so. Last year the director and trustees of the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., one of the nation’s premier museums, picked through their collection and sent more than 200 of the most valuable items–and, in some cases, the most historically important–off to Sotheby’s, where this spring they realized a tidy $67.2 million.

The auction houses, for their part, have been reaching out to the rarefied world of museums. In 1995, Richard Oldenburg relinquished the directorship of MoMA to become chairman of Sotheby’s America. Around the same time, Charles S. Moffett, an authority on French Impressionist art, moved from the directorship of Washington’s Phillips Collection to a senior post at the same auction house.

And why shouldn’t they have done so? Such auction-house jobs offer bigger paychecks and, just as attractive, they free these new arrivals from the relentless drudgery of raising money, which is pretty much all that museum directors do these days.

What do the auction houses get? A little class, for one thing. Auctioneers tend to be insecure about their line of work, a fact illustrated by an old saw bout the difference between Sotheby’s and Christie’s: One consists of auctioneers trying to be gentlemen; the other of gentlemen trying to be auctioneers.

So, for example, auctioneers dress up in black tie to conduct the big-ticket auctions–to make sure you don’t confuse them with other folks around the country who knock down hogs and repossessed cars for a living and to gloss over the fact that they’ll, well, sell anything. (Remember Andy Warhol’s cookie jars?) Keep a few former museum directors on the premises and not only do you get their expertise but you can hold your head up a little higher.

Museum people are also helpful with potential clients. It unsettles collectors who want to sell their art to think that they’re merely “cashing in.” Too vulgar. Far more comforting to view yourself as an enlightened patron reluctantly but generously parting, after years of careful stewardship, with a cultural milestone so that others might enjoy it.

And who better to help with this existential makeover, and thereby ease the painting off the wall and into the saleroom, than an ex-director, equipped as he is with the proper intellectual pedigree and able to drop all the right scholarly references just when they’re needed?

Which brings us to the main reason that auction houses find museum people so attractive: They know where the bodies are buried. In the course of their work they learn who has what important works of art because that’s how they organize their exhibitions. They spend hundreds of hours tracking down objects–some famous, some obscure–and visiting their owners in hopes of borrowing them. In the course of such visits, they might well come upon other works of art that the collector owns.

Auction houses rely on a steady stream of loot to stay in business, so they badly need this insider information. It’s especially valuable given the surprisingly large number of A-list works of art still in private hands. A collector is far more likely to be persuaded to part with his treasures by an ex-museum director with whom he probably already has a relationship than by a cold-calling “expert” from Sotheby’s or Christie’s.

This trend, although a rainmaking boon for the auction houses, might in the long run wind up making life more difficult for museums. The loan exhibition–the big draw for most art museums–is already hard to bring off, given increasing red tape, high insurance costs and fears of terrorism. And it may become a near-impossible task if collectors start to think that the museum director pleading with them to lend a masterpiece today will be an auctioneer badgering them to sell it tomorrow.

Mr. Gibson is The Wall Street Journal’s Leisure & Arts features editor.