[CPProt.net] Once highflying, the Getty is beset by charges of stolen antiquities and profligate executive perks

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

Case of the Looted Relics
Once highflying, the Getty is beset by charges of stolen antiquities and
profligate executive perks
By JAMES PONIEWOZIK

Great art museums are in part about the beautiful display of money: dearly
acquired works shown in costly surroundings. By that standard, the J. Paul
Getty Museum in Los Angeles is among the greatest. It occupies a Richard
Meier--designed campus of Italian travertine high in the Santa Monica
Mountains. It husbands a $5 billion-plus endowment. With that war chest--the
legacy of oil mogul J. Paul Getty, who died in 1976--it built in a few
decades a collection that would have taken another museum generations.

Now the Getty is getting attention for the kinds of spending that museums
don't brag about. Next month, the trial of former antiquities curator,
Marion True, resumes in Italy on charges that she helped the museum buy 42
illegally looted Roman and Etruscan artifacts. True has denied the
allegations, but last week she resigned after the revelation that a dealer
involved in some of the purchases helped her get a loan for a vacation home
in Greece. Critics of the museum say her case is a symptom of a culture of
mismanagement and excess, in which the head of the museum's trust allegedly
used the institution as a piggy bank to, among other things, buy himself a
$72,000 car. The Getty, it seems, may be melting down faster than it was
built up.

The tainted-goods charges are not unique to the Getty. For decades, ancient
artifacts have been illicitly dug up and sold to see-no-evil museums. But
the Getty was a notoriously aggressive collector, and some in the art world
believe that its hunger and spending habits encouraged looting and theft.
Ironically, True was responsible in 1995 for the Getty's adopting a strict
policy of buying only well-documented pieces. "She extricated the museum
from an ethical morass," says University of Virginia professor of art
history Malcolm Bell. "It's extremely sad that the one person who understood
that the intellectual integrity of her institution depended on respecting
knowledge is now going on trial."

But the Getty's problems extend well beyond True. Earlier this year, a Los
Angeles Times investigation, based on hundreds of leaked documents, charged
that museum officials had known for years that its suppliers may have been
selling looted works. A former museum official says the museum did not buy
anything it "knew or strongly suspected came from an illicit source." The
Times also reported that the trust's president, Barry Munitz, has had the
Getty spring for such perks as first-class plane tickets, yacht rentals and
a Porsche SUV (which he reportedly directed should have "the biggest
possible sunroof"). Because the Getty is a nonprofit institution, taxpayers
would be underwriting his airline legroom, and the California attorney
general is investigating the spending.

Some Getty staff members contend that Munitz has been more interested in
impressing celebrities and rising socially than in serving the institution's
interests. (One charge leveled against Munitz, which he denies, is that he
helped arrange the sale of Getty-owned property to billionaire Eli Broad, a
close friend, at $700,000 less than its appraised value.) "Barry wasn't very
interested in the core mission of the organization," says a former staff
member. "He was even somewhat bored with it." Last year the Getty lost
director Deborah Gribbon, a 20-year veteran, over differences with Munitz,
who came to the museum in 1998. Other staff members were alienated when he
hired as his chief of staff Jill Murphy--a 33-year-old with little art
experience; she has announced that she'll leave at the end of the year.
Munitz, who denies allegations of profligate spending, says that friction
was to be expected: "You cannot run a big, complicated institution and take
risks and make change and not have some people unhappy."

Now he must try to make a larger public happy. He has retained the p.r.
services of Michael Sitrick, who previously represented Mötley Crüe's
Tommy Lee. The museum has hired a new director, Michael Brand, and in early
2006 after a $275 million renovation will reopen the Malibu villa that
houses its antiquities. John Walsh, the museum's director from 1983 to 2000,
says the Getty once had "a certain intellectual and moral position which
was, ironically, brought about by its financial freedom." Things have
changed. The museum still occupies its lofty perch in the hills. But, says
Walsh: "the Getty is losing the high ground." --Reported by Jeanne
McDowell/Los Angeles

http://www.time.com/