Elephant Dung

We've all been bored to death with all the attention that some American museums have been getting online due to a variety of unethical lapses, deaccessioning of artwork, construction or deconstruction, parking lots, etc.

Yawn...

And over in that odd amalgamation of countries and peoples known as Great Britain, they're having their own issues (pronounced the BBC-way or eesssssius), with the Tate spending well over a million dollars (£705,000) in acquiring Christopher Ofili's work The Upper Room, which is partly made by using a few dozen dollops of elephant dung.

It's not the elephant doody that is the issue, but that at

"...the heart of the affair is the fact that, when The Upper Room was purchased from him for £705,000 earlier this year, Ofili was himself a Tate trustee. This, critics say, represents a major conflict of interest. It also seems to contradict official Tate guidelines, which say: "Even the perception of a conflict of interest in relation to a board member can be extremely damaging to the body's reputation."

Read the story in The Independent here.

About ten years ago, something somewhat similar (in my opinion) on a much lesser scale, happened here in DC as a result of a very generous donation left in the will of DC area artist Gene Davis to the then-named National Museum of American Art (now called the Smithsonian American Art Museum).

Read that story, published in 1995 in the WaPo, here.