The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Clueless at the Corcoran" @wsj by Eric Gibson

If the proposed "collaboration" goes through, it will mean the end of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Corbis

The past four or five decades have witnessed much upheaval in the art world. Museums have been founded, others enlarged, still others have spun off satellites. Some have relocated, others have merged. Yet no museum has consciously willed itself into oblivion, as Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art has done with its announcement Wednesday of a proposed "collaboration" with two other Washington institutions.

"The Corcoran" is actually two entities under one roof: an art school and museum. Under the terms of the proposed agreement—details of which have yet to be finalized—the Corcoran College of Art + Design will become part of George Washington University, which will also assume ownership and responsibility for the Corcoran's 1897 Beaux Arts building, no small undertaking since the perpetually cash-strapped museum needs some $100 million for deferred maintenance and upgrades on it.

The building's museum functions will be taken over by the National Gallery of Art, thereby realizing that museum's long-held dream of a dedicated space for its own shows of modern and contemporary art. It will be renamed "Corcoran Contemporary, National Gallery of Art." Some corner of the Corcoran building itself will be set aside as a Legacy Gallery for a rotating display of the museum's "signature works." Anything the National Gallery doesn't want will enter a "distribution plan" to place the works in other U.S. museums. In all, this is a sorry end for a once-proud U.S. arts institution.

This announcement is the latest in a string of policy lurches going back a decade or more as the Corcoran strove to find answers to problems of money, mission, visitorship and the physical plant. It wanted a satellite space in Southwest Washington, then it didn't. It wanted a Frank Gehry addition to the 17th Street Beaux Arts building, then it didn't. It wanted to sell that building and move to the suburbs, then it didn't. It had a partnership with the University of Maryland; now, evidently, it no longer does. This is mismanagement on a near-epic scale. If you added up the costs associated with developing, implementing, then abandoning each of these initiatives, you'd probably make a serious contribution to the renovation tab.

But of all the board's decisions, this one is by far the worst. Because if this agreement goes through—and there is no reason to doubt that it will—it will be the end of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The trustees will be washing their hands of their own institution, in effect saying: "Enough, already! Let someone else deal with it. We're done." This is a shocking dereliction of duty by Washington's supposedly enlightened elites—the lawyers, financiers and other well-educated, well-heeled professionals who make up its board.

Yet sadly, the Corcoran is not alone in its misguided ways. Indeed the untold story of our time is the emerging crisis in nonprofit governance, where boards embark on policies that go against—and even imperil—the mission of the institution they are charged to oversee and protect.

Exhibit A in this regard is, of course, New York City Opera, which in 2007 hired Gerard Mortier as an "edgy" choice for general director, setting in motion a chain of events that led to the closure of the company last year. The New York Public Library wants to gut its magnificent Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue and change it from a research institution to, as Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in this newspaper, "a state-of-the-art, socially interactive, computer-centered" circulating library, with fewer books, a good number of them moved off-site. Four years ago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles hired an art dealer, Jeffrey Deitch, as director, an unheard-of blurring of the line between commerce and art in a museum. Mr. Deitch soon fired Paul Schimmel, the longtime chief curator and one of the most respected professionals in his field, precipitating a hemorrhage of support. And had the Barnes Foundation not endured two decades of mismanagement—unnecessary lawsuits against the neighbors, for example—it might still be in Merion, Pa., instead of downtown Philadelphia.

The answer to why this is happening can be found in "The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made," the 1999 memoir by Flora Miller Biddle, granddaughter of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The book traces Biddle's involvement with the museum from 1958, when she was in her late 20s, to 1990—years in which she witnessed a dramatic change in the boardroom. In the 1960s, she writes, trustees were "idealistic and committed to public service" and possessed "a genuine love of art and faith in the museum." By the late 1970s and into the 1980s a new breed had emerged, one that "wanted to use the museum and their contacts there for social and business purposes."

Not everyone on a board today is an opportunist, of course; many are serious, dedicated supporters and benefactors. But it's impossible to ignore the shift away from boards populated by individuals who understand the values of the institution and the discipline. One now-retired museum director once told me that one of the hardest parts of his job was teaching new trustees from Wall Street that a museum is not a business in the sense that they understand the term.

Until the pendulum starts to swing back toward the kind of board member Ms. Biddle encountered early in her career, we're going to see a lot more tragedies like the one now engulfing the Corcoran.

Corrections & Amplifications
The National Gallery will integrate some of the Corcoran Gallery of Art's collection into its displays and holdings but will not sell any of the Corcoran's works. An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the nature of the National Gallery's custodianship of the Corcoran's collection.

Mr. Gibson is the Journal's Leisure & Arts Editor.

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