The Decibel - Behind the gallery wall: the art that museums don’t show you

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

If you were to spend an afternoon wandering around an art museum, you’d see hundreds of pieces, if not thousands. But the reality is, what you see on display is only a small percentage of a museum��s holdings. Depending on the institution, anywhere from 95 to 99 per cent of the artwork it owns is in storage – and according to a 2019 report, many of those storage spaces are so full that experts say the artworks may be at risk. Kate Taylor is the Globe’s visual arts critic. She’s on the show to explain how Canadian art museums ended up with such large collections, and how tax breaks are what drives collectors to donate their pieces.  Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

If you spend an afternoon walking around an art museum, you'd see hundreds of pieces. But that's very likely just a small percentage of what it actually has. I mean, an art museum is there to preserve both the art of the past for today and the art of the present for tomorrow. That's Kate Taylor, the Globe's arts critic. And so you have to be collecting continually both contemporary art, especially if that's the focus of an institution, but also sometimes historical art to fill in gaps.

It's a long game they play in museums. But having all that art means you have to find a place to store it. And that can be a challenge, especially since there's a system that gives big tax breaks to private donors, which has made it easier for museums to acquire more art. And all of this raises questions about why there's so much art that the public doesn't see. So Kate's here to explain why Canada's museums are fielding huge amounts of art donations every year and what it all means for taxpayers. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail.

Kate, it's great to have you back on the podcast. Glad to be here. So we're going to talk about how Canadian art museums are dealing with these massive art collections they have. To start, can you just give us a sense of the scale here? Like how much art are these institutions holding and how much of that actually gets shown to the public? Well, the Art Gallery of Ontario here in Toronto has a print and drawing collection of almost 100,000 items. But they have an incredible vault where all that's stored. And then they have about another 10,000 to 15,000 of, you know, paintings, sculptures, things, of course, that are much larger and harder to store. Those are all in storage then?

Well, no. At any given point, about 1% to 2% is out on display. The AGO has a very low percentage on display. That's partly because of the size of that print and drawing collection because, of course, prints and drawings, you can't expose to light all the time, unlike a painting or a sculpture, which you can have up all the time. They have to rotate. So they have quite a low level, whereas if you look at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, which has painting sculptures, but also a big collection of decorative arts, including furniture, they have about five to 6% on display at any given time. So they have a higher

percentage. National Gallery of Canada has almost 100,000 pieces in its collection. So I think the public is often unaware that it's standard for museums to show a tiny percentage of what they hold. Yeah, like really tiny percentage, like you're talking like five, six, 2%. Like these are small numbers. They're very small numbers. And obviously, there's a push to people always want to show more, show the public more of what after all belongs to them. But I think also it has to do kind of with how you program it. For example, with the print and drawing collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario, there's a lot of public access other than just exhibitions. I mean, there are times, specific times of the week where not just

researchers, but members of the public can get access and see things. This must differ from museum to museum. But do we know like where museums store this extra art and the conditions that they're being stored in? Well, they have vaults on site where they store it in climate-controlled conditions. Certainly with the large institutions, that's true. A lot of smaller institutions have problems with that. They sometimes use off-site storage, especially if you're collecting big pieces of contemporary installation art. You may not have room to store it in your building, so it would be off-site. The sort of smaller institutions often really struggle

with the climate control, security, safety, things like that. There was a study in 2019 that was done by two conservation groups, and they came up with sort of some shocking figures about the conditions in which things were being kept, and they estimated that half the institutions they surveyed, they didn't just survey art museums, they also surveyed general museums and archives, but that half the collections were, the curators would say there was some danger to the collection because of overcrowded storage. The most alarming examples

would be things like, for instance, a museum that's located in a floodplain and all its storage is in the basement. And what kind of options do museums have for how they typically acquire art? How do they get their art? Well, there are two ways you can acquire art. Either you buy it or someone gives it to you. So buying it can be tricky. Most Canadian museums do not have significant acquisition budgets. Many of the larger ones like, for example, Montreal or the Art Gallery of Ontario have endowment funds that they can reach into if they see some special thing they'd like to buy. They often have a fund that's earmarked for it. solid annual grant with which to buy art is the National Gallery of Canada, which gets $8 million a year from the federal government to build a national collection, in fact. But it's very unusual to have that kind of money committed. So if you can't necessarily buy it, what you do, of course, is hope that people will donate it to you. Sometimes that means a collector who has a

wonderful collection and is getting older and doesn't think his or her family is very interested in it, sometimes they will, you know, just give a whole collection. But then also another way in which the galleries kind of the museums use the system is by, if they see something they want to buy, they ask a donor to go and buy it for them and then donate it back to them. Okay, and we're going to get into all of these different options. Kate, I think we should delve a little bit more deeply into this and how our public institutions actually grow their collections then. So you talked about the ways that they get art. Can we look at a little bit of the history here on how art in Canada moved from,

I guess, private collections into the public realm? Yeah, well, to encourage people to donate, since it's often difficult for art museums to buy, you get tax credits for donating, and they're quite generous tax credits. They're more generous tax credits than you would get for giving cash. And to go back and give you a bit of history, in the 19th century, when Montreal was the industrial capital of Canada and was a very wealthy city, there were incredible collections in Montreal. Old masters, Impressionist paintings, there wasn't really Canadian art, this sort of predates really the growth of Canadian art in the 20th century, but there was a lot of important European art. And as that generation of wealth aged in the early 20th century

and died, most of the art left the country. And the sort of prime example is the collection of William Van Horn, who was the railway magnet, very, very wealthy man, and had apparently an incredible collection. It went to his children when he died. His daughter donated some of it to what is now the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, but the rest of it was sold. So by the 1970s, rather belatedly, the Canadian government was becoming aware that other countries held on to these cultural treasures, whereas in Canada, this stuff was just going down to New York and being sold at auction.

And so they moved to create this legislation which established the tax credits so that you could get a tax credit for donating. And I mean, I've heard people say, oh, you know, if that tax credit system had existed in the early 20th century, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts would have, you know, one of the finest collections on the continent. Okay, so this is the reason then why the government decided to put this legislation in place. So let's talk about that, Kate. What exactly is this legislation? Well, the legislation established the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board. And the initial job of the board is if you say, oh, I have this Picasso and I don't want it anymore and I'm going to sell it and I'm going to ship it down to New York and sell it at an auction in New

York, or I'm going to sell it at a Canadian auction where it's bought by a foreigner. At any rate, this Picasso is going to leave the country. So before, that's what would happen. You'd sell it, the painting would leave. Now, with art over a certain value, it has to be considered quite significant art, the government has to issue an export permit. And before it can issue an export permit, the Cultural Property Export Review Board has a panel of people who kind of step in and they say, well, what about this thing? Are we willing to lose it? Are we willing to give it an export permit so it leaves the country? And really the deciding factor is, is there a Canadian museum that wants to buy it? And if somebody steps up and says, yes, we'll buy it, then there are federal

grants available to help the museum buy it to keep the art in Canada rather than having it leave. So that's the first role of the Export Review Board. And that's why it has the word export in its name. What then kind of happened is it then has a parallel role, which is to judge whether art that someone is suggesting they're going to donate is worthy of the highest level of tax credits. And the system that was established gives a more generous tax credit than you would get if you gave cash. You can only give to a specific list, a kind of a list of institutions. So you can't be giving your grandma's painting to your local church or something like that. If the art

is judged to be of significance and you're giving it to one of these listed institutions, which would be all the major art galleries in the country, major public art galleries, then you get these tax credits that you can claim more of them. They're more useful to a taxpayer as a tax credit than a standard check for cash to your local hospital or something is. So yeah, it's different than kind of a regular charitable donation that people do more frequently then. Yeah, yeah, it's a higher level. It's a bigger credit, basically. Okay, so then explain this to me, Kate.

So is it really more advantageous then to, if you've got a piece of art, like if you're donating it then, is that a benefit to you? Well, as opposed to selling it. So obviously, if you sell it, you'll make something. But the reality is you might be making only a bit more than half its value by the time you've paid your capital gains tax, which if you've held the art for a long time, if you bought something when you were young, and it was only worth a few thousand dollars, and now it's worth hundreds of thousands, you're going to have significant capital gain to pay. So if you calculate that, and also calculate, of course, the cut that an auction house or a dealer will take for selling

the art for you, you will take away some profit, obviously, for selling, but nothing like the whole price tag. If you donate, obviously, you won't get that profit, but you will get tax credits that are worth probably anywhere from 30 to 60 percent of it. So by donating, you are foregoing some profit. But for someone who's held the art for a long time, so it's not like you're actually taking cash out of their pocket, it can seem in the end, well, why not donate it? It's not a huge difference financially. It's nothing like what the price of the thing is actually worth. And you get a lot of kudos, obviously, for donating art.

So really then what you're saying is that the system then is kind of set up in a way that it encourages people maybe with valuable art to donate it to public hands. And if that's its goal, it's been highly successful. One of the things that that report I mentioned from 2019, which was mainly sounding the alarm bells about the storage situation in the country, which most museums I've spoken to agree they have a real problem with storage. But the one thing that really caught my eye as a journalist was that half of the institutions said their collection had doubled or more than doubled in the last 20 years. So yeah, it's working. Every year, thousands more objects move into public hands. Yeah. I think the number I saw, this was in your story, I think the number was $70 million worth of art every year, basically, that moves through this system. Yeah, that's based on the last five years. It averages out. Obviously, some years it's more,

some years it's less, but about $70 of art and that 70 million at a minimum represents an amount of tax revenue that's not going to the federal government of at least 20 million and that's quite a conservative estimate that's not including if there had been capital gains that would have been payable. That's a really interesting point too the government then is missing out on $20 million of tax revenue. Yeah. One thing I say when we talk about art donations is it's not a birthday present, right? Art that is donated to a public institution is being bought at a very steep discount,

but it is being bought with tax credits. We'll be back in a moment. A lot of the system, Kate, seems to be based on the idea that this art is culturally significant. I think that was the term that you used earlier on, right? Who decides if it's culturally significant or not? Well, there's this board set up by the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board. They have like a panel who judge whether art is significant or not. Often what happens when a donor wants to donate, the donor's already in contact with the museum that's going to accept it, and the museum curators will write up a

recommendation of why they... And quite often they simply say, it's culturally significant, this significant piece of art. Quite often it's really just on a curator's say-so. One interesting thing that's happened there is the word national has been dropped. It used to be it was of national cultural significance. And there was an infamous case about five, six years ago of a French painting by Caillebotte, who's a contemporary of the Impressionists, and a painting of irises. And it had been bought at a Canadian auction by a British art dealer who wanted to export it, and he was denied an export permit. And this went to court, and a judge said, well, why is this French painting of national cultural significance? I don't see how it's significant to Canada. It's a French painting. So he said,

give them the export permit. And all hell broke loose because what the museum saw because of this paired system of both export and tax credits, they said, oh, all of a sudden, you're telling us that international art doesn't qualify as significant, that it could only be Canadian art. So the government quite quickly jumped in and changed the legislation. And so the word national has been disappeared. And it's now just work of cultural significance. Okay. That's interesting context. It still makes me wonder, though, because you said, you know, you don't necessarily need a justification for it. A curator could just say this is culturally significant. I mean, does that not leave space for, I don't know,

abuse of the system or for it to be applied in a way that maybe favors certain people? I don't know. Well, I think there has been some abuse of the system or some attempts to game the system in previous decades. My impression now is that the review board is quite scrupulous about this. And of course, to get your tax credit, you have to have an art museum that wants to take the art, right? If people say, man, that's a piece of junk, nobody wants it, you're not going to get your tax credit, you have to have an art museum that wants to take the art, right? If people say, man, that's a piece of junk, nobody wants it, you're not going to get anyone to accept it and you won't get a tax credit. So I think the question more is, there's an Ontario government audit of the Art Gallery of Ontario sort of value for money audit. One thing they noted was that the AGO often accepted art from its own donors, its board members or donors, people who are giving it cash as well as the art. The other thing also you can get, I mean, the curators ethically are supposed

to be absolutely scrupulous about this, about not accepting stuff they don't need. And they do, when they're asked if they'll take a donation in, they do look at storage as one of the issues. They look, can we curate this? Can we store it? Do we have space for it? Can we conserve it? Is it in condition that we have the expertise to restore if it needs restoration? But you do get situations where I think there's pressure, especially to take a job lot, right, to take a whole bunch of stuff so that you can get the few jams. This is interesting. I'm glad you brought it back to storage because this is kind of the end result of this whole system that we just talked through.

So I guess I wonder, Kate, is anyone talking about maybe changing the system slightly to kind of mitigate this problem that we see on the other end of overcrowding in these museums? Yeah, well, I mean, there are a bunch of solutions to overcrowding. One is to expand, of course, to build more space.

And I mean, the AGO is currently on its third expansion in three decades, building a whole new wing to show modern and contemporary art. Canadian museums are always expanding. And, you know, there's the Vancouver Art Gallery trying desperately after decades to get a new home built. And part of the problem there, the history there, is that many Canadian art museums from, well, from the first half of the 20th century, when a lot of them were established, either in the 20s and 30s or after the Second World War, they weren't put in purpose-built buildings. So if you look at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the building at its core is a courthouse, right? And if you go into it, there are marble hallways and columns and things like that. I mean, they've built around it, obviously. And there are lots of examples.

The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria is in an old house, again, expanded and whatever. So they aren't purpose-built buildings. And so that puts a lot of pressure on them to have buildings that are purpose-built and therefore easier to climate control. So anyway, building campaigns, they're always building campaigns on the go to build more space, to show more of the collection, and also sometimes to store more of it. Although it's much easier to convince donors they'd like to have their name on a fancy new gallery that's going to show art than on a boring old storage vault. Another solution is to rotate the art more so that, you know, the AGO is only showing one to two percent, but they're continually changing what one to two percent it is. And the AGO has become quite aggressive at rotating its permanent collection. So you used

to think of a museum as somewhere, you know, you go back and visit the old friends in the same space over and over, over the decades. You know, you'd be taking your kid back to see that. And that's not true at the AGO at all anymore. They're continually changing up the permanent collection. Another solution is off-site storage, which the national museums in Ottawa have quite good off-site storage available to them in Gatineau. So that's another thing is you start, well, you can start doing what we all do if we have too much stuff in our house, right, which is pay for a storage locker. I mean, the other thing people do, of course, is sell some old stuff. Like, do they consider

that? Can they sell? Well, in museums, that's called deaccessioning, when you sell something out of the collection. It used to be the rule was the only reason you could sell something, you had to sell for sort of curatorial reasons. You had to be culling the collection of something you had a duplicate of, or you had many, many examples of that artist's work, or a kind of situation. And the only reason you could do it was to buy more art.

The only way you could spend the money was to buy more art. You could most definitely not use it to pay you know, pay people's salaries or keep the lights on, or you couldn't use it for expenses. The attitudes were changing even before the pandemic, and the pandemic forced especially a lot of American museums into really difficult financial situations. And so people are starting to say, okay, you can sell, you know, not to keep the lights on, but you can include the expense of curating or restoring art in allowed sort of expenses if you deaccession. And museums are deaccessioning more than they used to. I think especially, you know, one of the realities is if there's been this recognition that you can't have museums that only show work by men. And the Historical Art Museum really is filled with work that was made by men.

And so, you know, if you want to really expand your collection and include more female artists, well, how are you going to find the space? How are you going to find the money? And so there's certainly been a bit of a loosening on the very sort of stringent rules that cover deaccessioning, and people are starting to accept a little more movement there. Just lastly here, Kate, I mean, we've talked a little bit about, you know, museums rotating art, so some of this stuff does get to see the light of day, the public does get to see it. I guess I wonder from the other side of things,

if you're donating a piece of art to a museum, and it gets kind of just stuck away in storage. I mean, have you heard from people on that side of things? Where does that leave the donors? Occasionally I'll hear collectors saying, well, you know, I donated this or I donated that, and it's never shown. And that Ontario audit that I mentioned of the Art Gallery of Ontario, that was one thing they said was, well, you accepted this art and tax credits were issued, and now you don't have it on display. I don't think that's entirely fair in that I think museums are aware of this issue and I increasingly, when I go into art museums,

there'll be a display of recent acquisitions. Look what we just got. They then may then, after a while, move into storage. With bigger collections, when it's a collection as opposed to an individual piece, sometimes the donors have an understanding with the museum about how long it will be on display. And if you're making a very large gift of a very significant collection, you would often stipulate how long and say, you know, this is on the understanding, it will be on display for 25

years or whatever it is. Obviously, it's like any sort of transaction, you know, the more you have to give, the more power you have to dictate the terms. Kate, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. This episode was edited and mixed by Kevin Sexton. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham.

David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.