Donald Trump has many controversial views, but where does he stand on the arts? Michael Miller investigates, and is not exactly surprised by what he finds.
In the spring of 1994, an artist named Paul Rebhan walked into the Museum of Modern Art in New York and taped one of his paintings to a wall. Next to the work, he placed a card that read, “Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Donald Trump.” “I thought maybe it was the type of art the Trumps might enjoy,” Rebhan told the Calgary Herald, which reported the artist’s non-sanctioned installation at the time.
Trump’s name—not to mention his physical presence—is an unfamiliar sight in the city’s major cultural institutions. Wealthy public figures often fall into cultural patronage if for nothing else than the tax break. But since the beginning of his career, Trump has been, at best, apathetic to the arts in New York, and elsewhere. His first media spectacle, in 1980, focused on the then-33-year-old developer destroying a pair of Art Deco reliefs that were part of the facade of the Bonwit Teller Building in midtown Manhattan, which Trump tore down to build his Trump Tower. The Metropolitan Museum of Art wanted the reliefs for its collection, as the Washington Post recalled in a bit of retrospective reporting recently, and Trump agreed to donate them, if the cost of their removal wasn’t prohibitive. It wasn’t, but Trump’s construction crew destroyed the works anyway. Trump later told the New York Times that he was concerned for “the safety of people on the street below…If one of those stones had slipped, people could have been killed.” The Times also reported that no one involved with the construction of Trump Tower even bothered to ask the Met how the sculptures could have been removed safely... Keep reading on ARTnews
In the spring of 1994, an artist named Paul Rebhan walked into the Museum of Modern Art in New York and taped one of his paintings to a wall. Next to the work, he placed a card that read, “Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Donald Trump.” “I thought maybe it was the type of art the Trumps might enjoy,” Rebhan told the Calgary Herald, which reported the artist’s non-sanctioned installation at the time.
Trump’s name—not to mention his physical presence—is an unfamiliar sight in the city’s major cultural institutions. Wealthy public figures often fall into cultural patronage if for nothing else than the tax break. But since the beginning of his career, Trump has been, at best, apathetic to the arts in New York, and elsewhere. His first media spectacle, in 1980, focused on the then-33-year-old developer destroying a pair of Art Deco reliefs that were part of the facade of the Bonwit Teller Building in midtown Manhattan, which Trump tore down to build his Trump Tower. The Metropolitan Museum of Art wanted the reliefs for its collection, as the Washington Post recalled in a bit of retrospective reporting recently, and Trump agreed to donate them, if the cost of their removal wasn’t prohibitive. It wasn’t, but Trump’s construction crew destroyed the works anyway. Trump later told the New York Times that he was concerned for “the safety of people on the street below…If one of those stones had slipped, people could have been killed.” The Times also reported that no one involved with the construction of Trump Tower even bothered to ask the Met how the sculptures could have been removed safely... Keep reading on ARTnews