Other major art museums in the US have dedicated acquisition funds. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) has a lively annual event instead called Collectors Committee Weekend. This year’s edition (20-21 April) raised about $2.65m, enough money for the museum to acquire a total of ten works of art across as many different departments. The big difference this time was that of the six acquired works made in the last century, five were by women, with Lacma adding to its collection pieces by Martha Boto, Betye Saar, Jennifer Bartlett and Julie Mehretu and its first sculpture by Ruth Asawa.
The event kicked off Friday night with swanky private dinners at trustees’ homes and wrapped up Saturday night with a gala dinner and small benefit auction at the museum. There, around 100 participants voted on museum acquisitions to be made with $1.9m raised from party ticket sales and auction items, with the extra funds coming from last-minute pledges for particular works.
But the heart of the event, which took place Saturday morning, consisted of ten curators speaking to a room packed with patrons in an unusually direct way about the value—both historical and financial—of the objects proposed for acquisition. In each case, the price and the seller was published. The curators laced their sales pitches with superlatives to highlight each “extraordinary” work of art and the “extraordinary” or “unique” opportunity to acquire it. “They sound like us,” laughed Kaeli Deane, the head of Latin American art at Phillips auction house.