@david81 @vuindiana - certainly not that easy. They may not want to accept the art due to tax write off issues.
is Valpo desperate financially where they need to sell these despite still having 4997 items? I would think so, thus the loophole is valid. All legal. The art museum is still there with nice stuff.
@vu84v2 raises a fantastic rhetorical question - if VU had $10M in cash (free and clear, with no encumbrances) would they use $10M to buy a valuable piece of art? We all know the answer is no - there is no way they would do so. Given the financial circumstances, there is no way they would have $10M in cash and spend even $1M of it on art.
If a donor said, "I'm going to give you $10M, but you have to spend all of it on art." VU might consider the donation, yet it probably costs VU 1% of the value of the art just for insurance, so may have to decline - that would be a $1M commitment just in insurance costs over the next decade. The tricky part is if a donor said, "I'm going to give you $10M, but you have to spend $1M of that on art." At least then, VU is way ahead, and the donor's wishes are honored.
The key tension for these three paintings is between respecting the donor's wishes from decades ago, and the serious financial needs of the university today.
and has been willing to tap into its endowment capital for non-essential expenditures (indeed, isn't that the criticism of the Strongbow purchase?),
Not sure what the criticism is as I think there was simply a misunderstanding regarding where the funds came from. It was thought, I believe, that the money used for the acquisition came from operating funds rather than the endowment. It is more than appropriate to invest endowment assets into a prime piece of real estate, particularly when it is adjacent to other owned property and actually enhances the value of same.
It seems to me there's a plausible argument that the Brauer estate should be able to reclaim the paintings.
Don't think Brauer or his estate would have any claim to these pieces as, I believe, he purchased the painting with museum funds, acting simply as an employee.
My understanding is that the difference in the strongbow purpose is that the restriction is the funds need to go towards land or other investment purchases with the funds made from those purposes free to use how the university sees fit. The different in the Sloan trust is that not only is their restriction on what could be purchased with the trust but in how the money made from the art can be spent as well. So it's restrictive on the front and back end. Maybe the university can use the money from the sale to purchase the art from the trust who can then reinvest it into something else and then sell it as they want and all trusts will be respected.....
vu72...thanks for posting. A very interesting and noteworthy designation. Wide range of schools in this dsignation.
VU has now publicly stated in its petition that the paintings are "impracticable, impossible and wasteful" -- note the oddity that they're not claiming this for the entire art museum, just its most valuable works.
Apparently, this now applies to the whole museum, and the slippery slope about which I advised since the beginning of this discussion now has proven true. Valparaiso University officially shut down the entire art museum this morning.
@valpopal please provide a source. I saw that the sale passed the court system and is underway.
Valparaiso University officially shut down the entire art museum this morning.
Sounds bad but I'm wondering about context. Is it shut down for no other reason that it is the middle of summer and no one uses it? Or is it more sinister, are we going to have a yard sale?
There is a post on Facebook (see "Coalition to Retire the Crusader") that says 14 staff members across the university have been let go as of today, and that Jonathan Canning was one of them. It also mentions that the Brauer Museum is closed until further notice. (Note that that thread has some corrections in the comments, as the first post suggested all 14 were from the Office of Student Life which does not seem to be the case.)
It seems the CRC has been taken down off of facebook. The group no longer appears in searches and the only reference to the group across the site is a torch article written in 2020
As I recall, Canning kinda wrote his own firing epitaph when he posted various incendiary items in the gallery. Don't recall the details but a few of us posted his eminent demise.
