Happy Malcolm Rogers Day, Boston!

Picture: MFA Boston via Tyler Green

Malcolm Rogers, director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, is retiring after twenty years and the mayor has announced that today is Malcolm Rogers Day. The lovefest is doubly inappropriate. 

It's inappropriate for a museum to idolise its own employees. The MFA has been more excited about its boss than its artwork, tweeting with gushing enthusiasm. But the staff ought properly to be behind the scenes. Promote the collection, promote the exhibitions. But puffing up your own staff stinks.

But it's also inappropriate because Malcolm Rogers is one of the worst and most damaging museum directors in recent history. He has done immense harm to the MFA and set worrying precedents for other museums. He has been at the forefront of 'monetising' art collections. That means he rents out Boston's greatest masterpieces to for-profit companies to turn a quick buck. Appalling risks are taken shipping large canvases around the world on a regular basis to be shown in expensive exhibitions with no scholarly justification. Dance at Bougival by Renoir has been on loan for a third of the past four years, reports the Boston Globe.   

The Globe's report is damning. At one point, all of the MFA's Cézannes, five of its six Manets, both of its Van Gogh portraits plus pictures by Renoir, Velazquez, Rembrandt, Degas and Picasso were being rented out at the same time. Ten of their 37 Monets have been rented out for more than three years between 2006 and 2013 and most of the others have been on extended loan. And one of their greatest pictures, Gauguin's huge masterpiece Where do we come from, who are we, where are we going, which had been considered too fragile to travel, has now been to four different venues for fourteen months.* Nothing is sacred. 

Malcolm Rogers himself got to pose with the dancing girls (above) when he rented the highlights of Boston's impressionist pictures to Bellagio. He is reveling in his role as cultural diplomat and curatorial entrepreneur. But while they paintings were in Vegas, the power failed for three and a half days in the blazing desert heat, reports Tyler Green. Moving pictures is always risky, but the risks are even greater when renting out to profit-making companies with an obvious incentive to cut costs and take risks. 

While depriving Boston of its best pictures, Rogers has promoted shallow populist exhibitions of fast cars, fashion and jewelry that have no place in a serious museum, however entertaining they may be. Three trustees have resigned, one explicitly citing concerns about Rogers' art rental business. Today we should be thankful for his over-due departure, not celebrating his disastrous tenure. 

Happy Malcolm Rogers day, folks.

*Updated: I'm reliably informed that the Gauguin is relatively stable and that several of the loans of that picture were to serious exhibitions rather than rentals. However, I would still be cautious of ever lending a picture so crucial to the institution, and I'd consider any large canvas to be especially vulnerable to travel.