Gamekeeper turned poacher

Richard Oldenburg, the respected director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, is now chairman of Sotheby's America. Does this mean art has given way to big business?

THE COMMERCIALISATION of art may have reached so fundamental a level that it is no longer possible to disentangle connoisseurship from business. Museums are kept alive by corporate sponsorship coupled with donations and loans from the super-rich - as well as by the shops they run; auction houses offer university- accredited courses in the fine and decorative arts; art dealers behave like mini-museums, mounting retrospectives and publishing art books.

Nothing better epitomises the interpenetration of business and art than the recent appointment of Richard Oldenburg, 61, the long-serving director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, as chairman of Sotheby's America - a translation from the world's most influential 20th-century museum to the most financially powerful institution in the art market.

Oldenburg retired from MOMA in 1994 and was offered the Sotheby's job in January this year; he accepted it in February and began work in April. "It represented a marvellous opportunity to stay in the same world," he told me. "I was slightly worried about how my museum contacts would react but everyone seems favourable."

Well, not quite everyone. Robert Hughes, the influential art critic of Time magazine who is America's leading art pundit, makes no bones about his horror of the auctioneering duopoly, Sotheby's and Christie's. "I like and admire Dick Oldenburg," he told me. "If I were God, I'd have given him a foundation as a retirement present. I'm sad he's being sucked into the totally pernicious cultural influence of Sotheby's and the auction system."

Maybe the course of Oldenburg's career with Sotheby's will provide an indication of whether Hughes has the right of it. If he stays, it could imply that Sotheby's are correct in considering their influence beneficial; if he goes - sooner rather than later - it will suggest it's pernicious.

There's no doubt that Sotheby's, which is now owned and run by an American shopping-mall billionaire, Al Taubman, has become a massively powerful business steamroller. Will it crunch the gentle museum administrator or will it let him get his hands on the controls?

Dick Oldenburg's personal distinction gives the outcome particular significance to the history of 20th-century culture. His own belief in the value of art to society cannot be doubted. He is the younger brother of Claes Oldenburg, the Pop artist renowned for his sculptures of fried eggs, hamburgers and other homely commodities. Their father took up a posting as Swedish consul in Chicago in 1936; the family spent the summer holidays in Sweden in 1939, but then couldn't go back till after the war, and ended up Americans.

Dick Oldenburg went to Harvard, served in the United States army, and in 1959 become an American citizen. He was exceptionally close to his brother as a child. "We didn't come from Chicago and felt different. Speaking Swedish was like a secret language - I found that very appealing." Claes and Dick both had imaginary kingdoms and published magazines about their countries: Claes's was called Neubern, while Dick's was Humbolt. Their father also had a country: "it was very aggressive".

Dick describes his brother as a marvellous role model. Not only was his draughtsmanship remarkable at a very early age, but he was also deeply interested in literature and writing; "he was a guide through the forest," Dick said. Both of them edited their college magazines and Claes tried his hand at journalism before gravitating to art in the 1950s.

Dick became a publisher. After he left the army in 1958, he found a job as an editorial trainee with Double-day, loved it and married a publisher. But he also frequently dropped in on his brother's world, getting to know his young and unrecognised friends: Tom Wesselman, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol. "On our wedding day, we had dinner in a Chinese restaurant, then I dragged my new wife to one of Claes's 'happenings'," Dick said. It was December 1960 and the happening was called "Blackouts".

In 1969, Dick Oldenburg joined the Museum of Modern Art as director of the publications department. He arrived at the museum at a moment of exceptional ferment. Student revolution was in full flood and MOMA, as a leading cultural institution, was a natural target; there were guerrilla actions against it and demonstrations in the lobby. The then director, John Hightower, couldn't take it and resigned.

Oldenburg took over the directorship in 1972. His gentle tact defused aggression and kept the museum on a course of high-profile expansion for 20 years. Bob Hughes described the museum to me recently as "the Kremlin of Modernism, swept by tides of mutual jealousy" - holding it on course was no mean feat.

Oldenburg describes the dominant feature of MOMA's development under his directorship as a transition from an elite institution to one serving a much wider public. The revolutionary challenge of the Sixties made museum trustees realise their public responsibilities, he says. During his term of office he oversaw a series of major exhibitions - notably blockbusters devoted to Picasso and Matisse - raised funds for a huge building programme, introduced corporate sponsorship, and gathered a family of rich supporters to finance new acquisitions, taking advantage of the American system of tax deductible donations.The museum's annual budget rose from $7.5m in 1972 to around $60m.

American museum financing has come to rest on marketing skills, most especially an ability to flatter the egos of tycoons into providing corporate or personal support. Oldenburg himself has written: "A director now is expected not simply to be a scholar and curator; he or she is to have business and marketing skills, to be an entrepreneur and negotiator, to handle union contracts, to lobby for legislation and government appropriations, to be a real-estate developer; almost everything you can think of. One of my museum colleagues recently said that the best training for a museum director now is to go to the Cornell School of hotel and restaurant management."

The same black-tie skills in entertaining potential museum patrons are required to turn the super-rich into art collectors, and thus auction clients. Though it sounds contradictory, Oldenburg is right in describing his new job at Sotheby's as an "opportunity to stay in the same world".

There is, however, a subtle difference in kind between sucking up to the rich in the hope of funding a cultural institution and sucking up to the rich in the hope of generating new business for an auction house. Sotheby's would like to blur the distinction and makes much of its educational courses - now run both in London and New York - its charity auctions - especially those to raise money for AIDS charities in honour of dying colleague Robert Woolley, once the humorous life and soul of the New York works of art department - and its corporate sponsorship of the arts.

Oldenburg is not required to take sales or get his hands dirty. He is to chair the company's museum services' committee, take a close interest in the education department, keep an eye on government and tax legilation and act as a roving ambassador - representing Sotheby's at the right parties in aid of the right causes.

Tall, quietly spoken and a little shy, Oldenburg conveys the impression of an old-fashioned European intellectual with an American accent, and he is a man of obvious probity. Will he manage to fit in with the razzmatazz of Sotheby's?

Since Al Taubman took over the firm in 1983, he has stamped it with his own American corporate culture. Last year he made Diana Brooks, a feisty 44-year-old ex-banker, the company's worldwide chief executive. She has made every effort to dilute her own tough business image by appointing subordinates from other cultures: Henry Wyndham, who is related to most of the British aristocracy and had trained at Christie's, was appointed European chairman; Hugh Hildersley, an old Sotheby hand who had taken holy orders and ran the smartest parish in Manahattan, was tempted back to act as Brooks's deputy.

Then, having got God on her side, Diana Brooks fished for a museum bigwig and landed Oldenburg. It remains to be seen what he makes of life in the Sotheby fish tank. !