Last week The Wall Street Journal ran an article about a tussel between rival museums, one in Japan and one in New York, dedicated to preserving the work of Japanese-American sculptor, Isamu Noguchi. Each museum appears to be jostling for prestige as well as physical control and ownership of certain works. In reading of this feud, one of the barbs that the New York museum threw at the Japanese museum struck me as particularly amusing. As it turns out, the Japanese museum sits on privately owned land. As a consequence, the New Yorkers worried about the owners of the museum land running into problems with their creditors. “What if those creditors show up and start hauling away art that doesn’t actually belong to the land owners, but to us?” they squawked. Their proposed solution is to erect signs beside the giant sculptures that would put any art-repo guys on notice that the true owners of the sculptures were not the land owners.
Naturally, my bankruptcy-tuned ears perked up and it made me wonder: has the rarified, big city, art world not yet learned how to perfect a security interest, file a notice of lis pendens, or any other number of subtler and more efficient ways of alerting creditors to keep their hands off certain property? And while I suppose posting signs beside the art work would be effective, doesn’t it seem a little, well…inartful?