Does art want to be free?

Interesting piece in DC’s City Paper this week about a museum of modern art in Maryland that’s not open to the public. I say interesting because I’m not at all sure how I feel about it.

On the one hand, Angela Valdez is suggesting that Mitchell Rales has a moral duty to open the doors of his home and his private museum to art lovers of all stripes. On the other, she is suggesting that there’s some sort of shady tax dodge in making the museum a nonprofit.

The problem is, she doesn’t come close to making the case for the latter argument. It’s simply tacked on as a “oh, by the way, in case you aren’t convinced by the moral argument we have this legal one.” But the moral argument simply isn’t persuasive to me. What we have here is a billionaire art collector who occasionally opens his doors to art students but not to the general public or the media, all the while giving millions upon millions of dollars to public museums so they can purchase art. I fail to see the problem here; at the risk of sounding Randian, Rales is under no obligation to me (or anyone else) to put his private property (not to mention personal life) on display. He can do with his paintings as he wishes.

The real story here is the potential tax dodge Rales is engaging in. As Valdez puts it:

The question is whether Rales’ museum is actually a nonprofit. This is where it gets a little confusing.

What she meant is this:

I don’t have the goods to show this is illegal, but it smells kind of fishy.

I sympathize with her predicament (lord knows I’m not tax expert), but maybe the City Paper should have had someone who is actually an expert in dodging taxes cowrite the piece. Because while I don’t find her “art wants to be free” argument convincing at all, I would be much more open to a “he needs to open up the museum or pay his taxes like a regular private citizen” argument (assuming, of course, that’s the way the law works). Valdez did a good job of digging into Rales’s personal life; unfortunately she seems to be out of her depth when it comes to the tax issue.