Keelin McDonell: The overpaid hack who is bleeding the Smithsonian dry
In 2000, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service received an anonymous tip that a luxury apartment near the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., housed a private and possibly illegal collection of tribal art. People who had visited the apartment whispered that its walls showcased hundreds of artifacts, including many containing what appeared to be plumage from rare or endangered birds. There was no way to know for sure, since the collection's owner had forgone plaques and scholarly labels and arranged the items to complement his décor. An inquiry began, and the agency's questions were quickly met with paperwork--import permits, contracts, receipts--from the owner and his lawyer. But, even after the investigation closed, the rumors persisted. Eventually, photographs of the controversial gallery published in magazine profiles of the owner piqued wildlife officials' interest once again. Four months after the initial investigation, officials reopened the case and asked him to allow another examination.
This was awkward in part because the owner, Lawrence Small, was head of the Smithsonian, one of the nation's premiere cultural institutions. And then there was the problem of his shifting stories. In December 2000, Small told Architectural Digest that he had legally purchased many of the artifacts while traveling through South America in the 1980s. But, when wildlife officials questioned him less than a year later, he claimed he had bought the bulk of his collection from an anthropologist in North Carolina in 1998 for about $400,000. After months of sifting through over 1,000 Amazonian artifacts, ornithologists and mammologists from the agency discovered that over 200 of the objets d'art contained feathers from protected birds, including the crested caracara and the roseate spoonbill. On January 5, 2004, a U.S. attorney in Raleigh, North Carolina, filed charges against Small for violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Small pleaded out to a class B misdemeanor; a federal judge ordered that he serve two years probation and 100 hours community service.
The modern museum was conceived as a byway connecting scholarship with the masses. It was meant to liberate knowledge and art and science from the monopoly of rich dilettantes and stuffy academics. So it's odd to see the head of America's most important network of museums hoarding cultural treasures for himself. And, unfortunately, Small has run the Smithsonian in the same vein. He has padded his own paycheck and those of his fellow executives while slashing research funding. Instead of protecting this prized collection for the public, he has cut deals with the private sector that limit mass access to its trove. As Representative David Obey put it, Small is as "crassly commercial as anybody in town." His highly corporate modus operandi has made him "the most reviled and detested administrator in the institution's history," in the words of a Smithsonian scientist who, in 2001, wrote a letter of complaint to the institute's regents. Worst of all, Small's pursuit of profit has largely failed. While donations are up, the institution has fallen short of its revenue goals and kept its funds far from researchers' pockets. In a few short years, Small has managed to turn good scholarship into bad business. ...
Read entire article at New Republic
This was awkward in part because the owner, Lawrence Small, was head of the Smithsonian, one of the nation's premiere cultural institutions. And then there was the problem of his shifting stories. In December 2000, Small told Architectural Digest that he had legally purchased many of the artifacts while traveling through South America in the 1980s. But, when wildlife officials questioned him less than a year later, he claimed he had bought the bulk of his collection from an anthropologist in North Carolina in 1998 for about $400,000. After months of sifting through over 1,000 Amazonian artifacts, ornithologists and mammologists from the agency discovered that over 200 of the objets d'art contained feathers from protected birds, including the crested caracara and the roseate spoonbill. On January 5, 2004, a U.S. attorney in Raleigh, North Carolina, filed charges against Small for violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Small pleaded out to a class B misdemeanor; a federal judge ordered that he serve two years probation and 100 hours community service.
The modern museum was conceived as a byway connecting scholarship with the masses. It was meant to liberate knowledge and art and science from the monopoly of rich dilettantes and stuffy academics. So it's odd to see the head of America's most important network of museums hoarding cultural treasures for himself. And, unfortunately, Small has run the Smithsonian in the same vein. He has padded his own paycheck and those of his fellow executives while slashing research funding. Instead of protecting this prized collection for the public, he has cut deals with the private sector that limit mass access to its trove. As Representative David Obey put it, Small is as "crassly commercial as anybody in town." His highly corporate modus operandi has made him "the most reviled and detested administrator in the institution's history," in the words of a Smithsonian scientist who, in 2001, wrote a letter of complaint to the institute's regents. Worst of all, Small's pursuit of profit has largely failed. While donations are up, the institution has fallen short of its revenue goals and kept its funds far from researchers' pockets. In a few short years, Small has managed to turn good scholarship into bad business. ...