DIA Director’s Letter — Millage Proposal Explained
Pioneering musician, poet, author, and artist Patti Smith has made her mark on the cultural landscape throughout her forty-year career, from her explorations of artistic expression with friend and vanguard photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the 1960s and ’70s to her profound influence on the nascent punk-rock scene in the late 1970s and ’80s. The more than sixty black-and-white images in this exhibition explore the themes that are significant to Smith: poets and writers; portraiture, including symbolic portraits; travel; and art and architecture. Smith’s photographs, taken with a vintage Polaroid camera, highlight the rich relationships between art, architecture, poetry, and the everyday. Her titles, such as Roberto Bolaño’s Chair, Herman Hesse’s Typewriter, and My Father’s Cup, reference varied muses. Such objects are tightly cropped and detached from their surroundings; divorced from their original function, they become devotional images. Smith began taking 35 mm photographs in 1968 as components for collages and took up the serious use of the Polaroid Land Camera in 1995. Her photos are infused with personal significance and possess the same unfiltered, emotional quality prevalent in her poetry and song lyrics. The allure of her photographs is their often dreamlike imagery, and their modest size belies their depth and power. This exhibition was organized by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. In Detroit, the exhibition is supported by the City of Detroit. Patti Smith Concert, June 1, SOLD OUT
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Once Upon a Time
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The DIA Operating Agreement is up for renewal in 2018, so the City of Detroit could easily sell artworks today for delivery in 2018, getting the money today and delivering the artworks when the Founders Society is out of its hair. Practices that only allow for the sale of art if the proceeds are used to buy more art for the collection are for museums, not cities! Even if the City chooses not to sell today, as soon as the agreement is out of force — and 2018 is well before the end of the millage — the city can come in and sell art to settle its bills.
A better approach for everyone would be innovatively managing Detroit’s art collection, using some creativity to generate new financial returns to complement the collection’s existing cultural returns. With the collection’s multi-billion dollar value, the income yield should be substantially more than what the millage would generate, fully funding the DIA and other cultural services, like DPS art classes and artist commissions for new DIA works, while leaving a surplus to support public safety and health. Creativity lets the DIA collection generate this financial yield while the artworks still hang on its walls.
As long as Detroit has billions of dollars invested in its art collection, the City will always have the temptation to sell. By managing the collection to generate income while it’s still inside the DIA, the Founders Society can eliminate that temptation. That way, even the other legal possibilities won’t cause any legal fights. Artworks funding the arts! Let’s say, less ungrammatically, “Gotta Make It Happen!”