If you missed this, the NYTimes ran a politically-motivated hatchet job story by Robin Pogrebin that deserves to be read as an example of a major Nothingburger! Here’s the letter I sent to Robin.
Hi Robin:
I kind of get what you were trying to do with the Mercer story, but the only valid issue — which you didn’t even allege (and which Ellen Futter seems to refute) — is whether Mercer’s board membership has any impact on the museum’s intellectual and scientific positions. Otherwise, it’s just some rich person on a board. What else is new? You don’t even suggest that the money comes from societally harmful investments (whatever they might be).
We don’t need to go back to scoundrels like Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie to remind us of how slippery these slopes are. David Koch’s name at Lincoln Center and the Met can be seen as problematic (and with potentially far more impact on what’s happening in our country). And the Sackler name — visible all over the place (the Met, Brooklyn Museum, Smithsonian, and endlessly in London) — could be especially worrisome for those of us worried about the current Oxycontin epidemic; the NYT has written a lot about the epidemic but not about the people who own Purdue Pharma (and about how they are now going after foreign markets to make up for the attacks on them in the USA). Do we expect Judy Chicago to publicly disavow her central place in Brooklyn’s feminist art center because of where Elizabeth Sackler got her money? Should you be interviewing Arnold Lehman about this?
Selective, gotcha, journalism may make self-righteous liberals feel good, but I expect more from you.
Cheers,
Tom Freudenheim