31.5.04

Private Collectors: Get Your Art into a Museum Now

An interesting little article (Nazi claims cloud Berlin art show, May 31) by Bethany Bell from BBC News reports that a German collector, named Friedrich Christian Flick, has offered to loan his collection of some 2,500 modern art works to a modern art museum in Berlin for seven years. Jewish leaders call the offer an attempt to whitewash blood money and claim that some of Flick's collection and money were inherited from his grandfather, who notoriously supplied arms to the Nazis by using slave labor. I suspect that this may have something to do with learning from the mistakes of Charles Saatchi.

I think the BBC's regular copy editor must have been sick, because the article claims that the collection includes "pieces by Marcel Ducon and Alberto Jacometti," for which I think we should read Duchamp (who would surely have loved the unintended naughtiness of this error) and Giacometti, and the museum in question is listed as the "Hamburger Banhoff," meaning the Hamburger Bahnhof.

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