Arts: Slamming MFA's Rogers

Today's Globe op-ed page includes a piece by art critic Tyler Green attacking Museum of Fine Arts director Malcolm Rogers for renting MFA-owned artworks to for-profit Las Vegas galleries for the second year in a row. "At the very least Rogers should stop pretending that renting paintings so that a private business can charge $15 to see them is altruistic populism rather than profit-motivated enterprise," Green writes. And he concludes by calling on the Senate Finance Committee to investigate this use - or misuse - of the MFA's tax-exempt status, as it did with the Nature Conservancy.

Comments

[Charles Hankin]

Great essay. The profit motive of museums is something that needs to be looked at. They sell prints of paintings that have no copy right and think they are the owners of the image. What ever happened to the idea that copyrights expire after time. This practice of unfair competition keeps living artists from making sales. Who would watch baseball if all they showed were movies of the Babe? Museums are stuck in the past.