James Cuno, master of your universe

Jori Finkel's portrait of the Art Institute of Chicago's director, A Man Who Loves Big Museums, starts out with one of those telling anecdotes journalists are so fond of:

WHEN James Cuno stepped into his job as director and president of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004, employees were a touch nervous. The departing director, James Wood, had begun the most ambitious expansion in the museum’s history. But ground had not yet been broken. And although he had raised $120 million, at least twice that would be needed.

It was a pivotal time, and after 24 years at the museum Mr. Wood was handing the reins to a man who had led the Courtauld Institute in London for less than 24 months.

Then late one afternoon, one employee after another caught sight of Mr. Cuno moving into his office — by himself. Although the museum has a staff of nearly 600, he was carting and carrying stacks of books on his own. It was an early sign that Mr. Cuno, who goes by Jim and not James, would be a down-to-earth, hands-on leader, one with a deep commitment to recent art-historical scholarship.

“I’m a bit compulsive about my library — the way it’s organized, which is rather intuitive,” said Mr. Cuno, 57. “And physically putting the books away helps me to remember where they are.”

So far, so good. But then there's this startling sequence:

This month he can add a new title of his own to those shelves: “Who Owns Antiquity?,” published by Princeton University Press. While it is far from his first book (he has written about Jasper Johns and Joseph Beuys, among other artists), it is his first dedicated to the political minefield of cultural patrimony. A condemnation of cultural property laws that restrict the international trade in antiquities, the book doubles as a celebration of the world’s great border-crossing encyclopedic museums, among them the Art Institute and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. ...

Mr. Cuno contends that “the accident of geography” should not give nations exclusive claims on archaeological material that happens to be found within their borders. He asserts that a country’s cultural patrimony policies reflect its political or diplomatic agenda more than a commitment to preserving culture. And he argues for the revival of partage, a practice in which museums or universities aid the excavation of an archaeological site in another country in exchange for some of the artifacts.

“People will assume my argument in favor of partage is a thinly disguised argument for imperialism,” he said. “But partage helped to create not just the university museums and encyclopedic museums in this country, but also museums locally on site — like the national museums of Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Yeah, an accident of geography! As if artists and craftsmen are somehow free agents, who pop up fully-formed in cultures, their creations unsullied by all that surrounds and nurtures them, nothing taken therefore nothing owed.

It's really an insane argument; Cuno's essentially arguing hey, if there's a group that's strong today--Western collectors and curators--there's no problem if they strip what they want from people who at this point in time can't outbid or defend their heritage.

That this universal class of masters of the universe should of course take precedence over the 'accidental' possesors of art.

And hey, after all, it's not like the rich are taking everything--they're leaving behind what they don't want in museums for the natives!

Sheesh.... It makes you reinterpret the opening anecdote.

Maybe the reason Cuno carried his own books in was to keep someone from coming along and taking them.

Times photo by Peter Wynn Thompson