Bard College, Frank Gehry, money and power
posted to www.marxmail.org on January 29, 2003
After a long
absence following a devastating fire, The Baffler (http://www.thebaffler.com/)
is publishing once again. This magazine can be described among other things as
analyst/critic of a growing tendency in corporate America to co-opt the
avant-garde and the counter-culture. While there are abundant images that come
to mind to illustrate this tendency, the Gap Ads of the 1980s featuring the
homosexual, drug addict and beat novelist William S. Burroughs should suffice.
The first
post-fire issue of The Baffler has an article on Frank Gehry that prompts me to
say a few words about Bard College, where the architect's latest project is
under construction. (http://www.bard.edu/pac/) I would not dream of making
esthetic judgments, other than to say that it looks like a gingerbread house
designed by somebody on an acid trip. I am far more interested in expanding on
some of the concerns raised in the Baffler article that have as much to do with
power and money as they do with art.
Before
getting into these questions, it would be useful to say a word or two about
Bard College's president Leon Botstein, who has run the place for 27 years now.
In many ways, it really has become Botstein College while retaining the old
name. It is difficult to think of any other educational institution that has
been so radically recast in the image of its CEO. For that matter, it is hard
to name more than a couple of college presidents who have staked out such a
high profile image as Botstein. Except for the braying reactionary John Silber
at Boston University and the more circumspect but equally reactionary ex-World
Bank boss Larry Summers at Harvard, one would be hard pressed to name any other
college president so much in the public eye.
At first
blush, Botstein's style and politics differs from theirs. He is the slick,
postmodernist liberal who would never be found guilty of bullying an underling
in the manner of Larry Summers calling rap singing professor Cornel West on the
carpet. Then again, perhaps not everything is so placid on the Botstein estate.
As reported in the October 10, 1997 Chronicle of Higher Education, "his
actions have earned him a reputation here as authoritarian." Professor of
Physics Peter D. Skiff is quoted as saying, "He does not fathom alternatives
to his way of thinking."
Botstein
comes across as a Renaissance Man. When he is not dictating to underlings like
Skiff, he is out conducting symphony orchestras (albeit mediocrely) or writing
think pieces on a variety of topics in the mass media. Lexis-Nexis revealed 24
articles, including one promoting the values of self-reliance and risk-taking
in the July 5, 1982 US News and World Report.
With such a
premium placed on risk-taking, it should not come as a big surprise that
Botstein was able to line up financiers George Soros and Leon Levy as major
donors. In a January 27, 1996 NY Times article, Botstein fawned over the
deep-pocketed nabobs: "These are people who made their money by doing
something new, not something old. They haven't clipped coupons."
I imagine that
everybody is familiar with the kind of new things that George Soros did in the
1990s, especially in Southeast Asia. It was widely reported that currency
speculation carried out under the auspices of his Hedge Fund caused the Thai
economy to crash. This led subsequently to financial failure throughout the
region. A column in Bangkok's "Thai Ray" commented at the time:
"In this new era, there is no need to use troops, warships, bombs, or
weapons to occupy any country. Just send out one broker and the target will be
totally destroyed. In a war of the present era, people are killed by
poverty."
Botstein
would seem to share Soros's missionary complex vis-à-vis the former Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe. With money siphoned from developing economies like
Thailand's, Soros has been able to foot the bill for Bard College's colonizing
effort in St. Petersburg, namely Smolny College, which sits next door to the
organizing center of the October 1917 revolution--thus bringing the
counter-revolution full cycle. Claude Allegre, the former French education
minister, expressed misgivings about efforts such as Smolny College: ''That our
students go and study in the United States and Britain is entirely desirable,
but that the Americans install their universities throughout the world, all on
the same model and with the same courses, is a catastrophe." Well, what
can one say--that's just the voice of Old Europe once again. For the New Europe
of Donald Rumsfeld, handouts from people like George Soros are eagerly accepted,
especially since college professors in the liberated Russia republic average
about $65 per month.
Until today,
I had little idea of how Leon Levy put together his fortune. A few hours on the
Internet revealed that he is what is known as a leveraged buyout artist. His
Odyssey Partners put together deal after deal in the 1980s that left a string
of bankrupt companies in its trail--with all the human suffering that entails.
When the Levy family launched the Levy Institute at an old mansion called
Blithewood, a trade union official representing workers who had been in a
running battle with the management of a restaurant owned by the family,
wrote the executive director raising some concerns, among which is the
following:
"As you
may be aware, Odyssey Partners is also a named defendant in shareholder
litigation that arose in the aftermath of the infamous accounting scandal at
apparel-maker Leslie Fay. In the early 1980s, Leslie Fay underwent two
management-led leveraged buyouts. The second LBO, in 1984, involved Odyssey
Partners, Merrill Lynch, and Goldome Savings Bank. In June of 1991, the company
underwent its third initial public offering, raising $40.6 million after
expenses, all of which went to Odyssey Partners and/or to Steven M. Friedman, a
former Odyssey general partner. In 1993, Leslie Fay's accountants discovered
accounting 'discrepancies' and contended in a subsequent lawsuit that Leslie
Fay's senior management conspired to conceal the true financial health of the
company prior to and during the three public offerings. Odyssey Partners is a
defendant in this lawsuit. Last year, Leslie Fay endured a 40 day strike over
its proposal to close most of its domestic manufacturing operations (and to
eliminate 1200 jobs), despite wage and benefit concessions workers had made to
help return the company to profitability. Leslie Fay is now a sad shadow of its
former self. Sales and profits are down sharply, and, according to Women's Wear
Daily, the company 'now sits on the edge of oblivion.'"
full: http://makeashorterlink.com/?W2FF21543
Despite
their rather aggressive moneymaking appetites, both Soros and Levy now position
themselves as friends of the left. Given the state of the world, one suspects
that they are simply using a hedging strategy to protect their long-term
interests. If at some point down the road the long-suffering masses decide to
rid themselves of their oppressors, Soros and Levy might plead that they were
with the revolution all along.
Soros writes
books and articles lamenting globalization, while his Open Society foundation
lavishes money on various grass-roots organizations fighting for social change,
especially on the Internet. For example, alternet.org got a $78,660 grant--and
so on.
Meanwhile,
the Levy Institute at Bard constantly issues press releases and other material
calling attention to irrational capitalist behavior. Old Leon Levy himself
occasionally writes something for the New York Review of Books with Jeff
Madrick, an Institute fellow with impeccable liberal credentials--including the
October 8, 1998 "Wall Street Blues". But to really
show their "street cred", the Levy boys went out and hired themselves
a bona fide Marxist, namely Anwar Shaikh of the New School. As a research
fellow at the Levy Institute, Shaikh wrote hard-hitting indictments of the
capitalist system while the Levy brothers were out stripping assets in the same
manner as Gordon Gecko in Oliver Stone's "Wall Street" in order to
pay for his stipend. We need a latter-day Bertolt Brecht to do justice to this
sort of thing.
Turning now to the Baffler article ("Build
It and They Will Pay" by Andrew Friedman), one understands completely why
somebody like Leon Levy would write a blank check for something like the Gehry
performing arts center. In 2001, when the Board of Trustees lavished $120
million on Leon Botstein, $50 million came from Leon Levy. From that gift, $100
million was put into the general endowment, while the remaining $20 million was
set aside to endow capital projects like the college's new performing arts
center. For Botstein's purposes, this would be money well spent since Gehry's
name has instant cachet, like a Rolex watch or a Prada handbag.
Although
Friedman's article focuses on the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, the
observations seem relevant to any Gehry project. He writes:
"No
sooner was the thing built, however, than the Basques started to learn what
Gehry's vision was costing them. In his book Chronicle of a Seduction: The
Guggenheim Bilbao, Joseba Zulaika dissects the deal under which the museum was
built. It's a story of uneven power relations, mortgaged urban futures, and
fiscal chicanery, most of which cannot be told by official sources because
their agreement contains a clause forbidding public disclosure. But it seems
that after a year of secret negotiations, the Guggenheim stuck the city--which
lost 40,000 jobs with the demise of its largest steel plant, and which still
struggles with 25 percent unemployment--with a stiff bill. By 2000, Zulaika
writes, the Basques were in for $250 million--that's $700 for each Bilbao
resident. On top of that, the local government is committed to a perpetual
public subsidy of $7 to $14 million a year."
My own
prediction is that the Gehry building at Bard will involve the same kind of
waste, but as long as Leon Levy is sitting on such a huge fortune then the sky
is the limit. This kind of overweening ambition seems oddly out of place both
for the Guggenheim and for Bard. It is rather 1990s, so to speak. In fact, this
kind of excess has begun to backfire on Thomas Krens, who is to the Guggenheim
as Botstein is to Bard. Deep in debt, Krens resolved to solve things in the
manner that anybody from the high-flying 90s would--he fired 80 employees, a
fifth of his staff.
There is
another similarity between Krens and Botstein: both are empire-builders. While
Krens had ambitious plans to create many Guggenheims around the world, Botstein
spawns seedling institutions like Smolny College and the Bard Decorative Arts
Museum run by Mrs. Soros. What better architectural design to express this
overarching ambition than Gehry's plastic, computer-generated postmodernist
works, whose innovations, according to Friedman, "are better thought of as
extensions of the logic of capitalism into the deregulated plastic economy of
the Nineties."
Hence it was
no surprise that Enron, that symbol of the roaring 1990s, would tout Gehry's
work highly. As ex-CEO Jeffrey Skilling wrote for the catalog that accompanied
an Enron-funded Gehry retrospective:
"Enron
shares Mr. Gehry's ongoing search for the moment of truth, the moment when the
functional approach to a problem becomes infused with the artistry that
produces a truly innovative solution. This is the search Enron embarks on every
day by questioning the conventional to change business paradigms and create new
markets that will shape the New Economy. It is the shared sense of challenge
that we admire most in Frank Gehry."