The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

Jorge Pérez has made what appears to be a generous gift to the Miami Art Museum, an act that has been billed as one of the most generous in the city’s philanthropic history. In return, the museum sold him its name. Before we break out the Champagne, let’s do the math on this gift.

The headline gift totals $35 million: $20 million in cash and $15 million in art from his collection. Let’s start with the cash, because that’s what the museum needs immediately to fund construction of its new building. When the project began in 2005, Mr. Pérez made a $5 million pledge, which remains part of the $10 million cash gift he proposes to pay by 2012. He also proposes to pay another $10 million in 2022, 10 years from now, so let’s say the present value is $5 million. That’s a cash total of $15 million. This compares to Miami-Dade giving $100 million of its citizens’ money and the city giving land worth $50 million for a total of $150 million. Mr. Pérez’ gift amounts to 10 percent of Miami’s gift and he gets the name of the museum. And this doesn’t consider the risk of a substantial loss of funding from existing and future donors. Something doesn’t compute.

The $15 million worth of art was added to bring the headline gift to a level commensurate with the Frosts’ and Adrienne Arsht’s recent cash gifts. Until now, MAM’s capital campaign policy was “cash only.” Any professional fund raiser will tell you that a gift of art (which the museum can’t sell for ethical reasons) doesn’t pay for construction costs and doesn’t count towards naming rights.

When the MAM board approved the renaming there was no discussion of the longterm implications of the name change. No one mentioned that the American Association of Museum Directors, which accredits MAM, cannot find a single instance of a civic art museum selling its name to a donor, for any amount of money.

MAM’s leadership and Mr. Pérez have turned a deaf ear to the outpouring of negative responses to the name change, ignoring the constituency they ostensibly serve. The citizens of this great community paid for the museum and it should bear their name. How about a wing, Mr. Pérez? That would compute.

Howard S. Frank, Miami

Anti-casino advocates gathered in Miami’s artiest neighborhood Saturday morning and warned that bringing mega-casinos to South Florida threatens to reverse the city’s cultural progress.

“Downtown is finally becoming what we want downtown to be,’’ former Miami-Dade commissioner Katy Sorenson told a crowd of about 120 people at the Light Box Theater, a performance space in Wynwood. “We’ve got some unique, funky Miami kind of things going on. Why do we want to these huge mega-resorts to come in?”

The speakers at the Urban Environment League forum covered the full range of anti-casino arguments, from worries over gambling addictions to traffic woes if Florida approves a bill designed to bring three $2 billion casino resorts to South Florida. But the setting — the Goldman Warehouse, home to art non-profits and owned by Tony Goldman, the developer behind Wynwood’s emergence as a gallery district — highlighted the role the arts are playing in the debate.

In May, Genting Group announced its $236 million purchase of The Miami Herald site at an Adrienne Arsht Performing Arts Center conference room. The chairman of the center’s board, Mike Eidson, joined executives of the Malaysian casino company at that first press conference, and later talked about the center running a 700-seat theater for Genting.

But after the friendly debut, Eidson and others in the Arsht leadership backed off, voicing worries about Genting’s plan to build the world’s largest casino across the street. In an interview Saturday, Eidson, a prominent lawyer, spoke in the harshest terms yet on the Genting resort’s potential impact on the county-owned Arsht center as a cultural hub for downtown.

“It’s too big. It overwhelms the entire arts concept we had there,’’ Eidson said. “We could never come up with a plan that could accommodate that.”

He said the center’s initial willingness to work with its new neighbor in developing the neighborhood turned to “grave” concerns at a subsequent lavish dinner on an Arsht stage when Genting executives outlined just how big the resort would be.

“It makes the Arsht Center look insignificant,’’ he said. “All that money we put into that facility, and you wouldn’t even notice it anymore.”

Genting executives were not available for interviews Saturday. But in past statements, the company has argued its 30-acre Resorts World Miami will elevate the city as a global destination by bringing stunning architecture and a new wave of Asian tourists.

It also argues the 5,200-room resort would bolster the Arsht center by delivering a steady stream of guests to the tax-funded facility and paying for permanent shows on slow nights.

Genting’s plan has galvanized many in Miami’s growing arts scene. Norman Braman, one of the city’s wealthiest art collectors, is a leader in the anti-casino movement. Jorge Perez, whose $35 million gift would put his name on the Miami Art Museum’s new home across I-395 from the Genting site, has criticized the plan. Art Basel, the Swiss-based arts show that comes to Miami Beach in December, has privately warned it might seek a different winter home if the casino resorts move in, according to city officials.

 

But not everyone is happy that the institution, now known as the Miami Art Museum, will be recast as the Jorge M. Pérez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County to recognize Mr. Pérez’s $35 million gift in cash and art.

Four board members have resigned in protest. Several are threatening to rescind their contributions. Protest e-mails to museum officials have complained that an institution being built on public land and largely financed by taxpayers should not be named for an individual, no matter how generous.

“Name a plaza or a wing or the building,” said Rubén A. Rodríguez, one of the trustees who resigned, “but not the institution.”

The naming and renaming of institutions, arenas, even bridges, after people, to raise money or recognize civic contributions, typically engender little fuss. (Think of the Guggenheim or the Getty, not the former Brendan Byrne Arena.) There was hardly a peep when the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center became the David H. Koch Theater in 2008, after Mr. Koch’s pledge of $100 million.

But in an era when the need for cultural largesse by the wealthy is only expanding, there has been an unusual level of opposition here to the idea of renaming a community resource after an individual patron of the arts.

Is it the timing? The size of the gift? Mr. Pérez’s career as a major developer here? Or perhaps jealousy on the part of others whose own major contributions to the arts have never secured such a high-profile designation?

Museum officials say they’ve been surprised by the community reaction to the name change, though they caution against exaggerating the response. The change, after all, they said, was approved last week by a vote of the museum board; of the 35 members present, only 4 voted against, with 1 abstention.

Thomas Collins, the museum’s director, said the institution was fortunate that Mr. Pérez, a trustee, stepped up to take a lead role in its $220 million capital campaign to bolster its endowment and construct the new building, to be completed in 2013. Mr. Pérez’s $35 million gift includes a pledge of $20 million, along with $15 million worth of Latin American art, which he collects avidly.

“He has been part of the governance and leadership of the institution,” Mr. Collins said. “He has made a major commitment of fine art to the museum. Institutions have been named for people who’ve done just one of those things.”

Many institutions have taken to naming just about anything — hallways, lobbies, staircases — to raise money. In Miami naming has become something of a rage. In 2008 the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts — named for the cruise line — was renamed for the businesswoman and philanthropist Adrienne Arsht after her $30 million gift. When the Miami Science Museum opens its new building in 2014, it will be renamed the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science. There is also the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami and the Frost Museum of Art at Florida International University.

Naming is often a prickly issue for an institution, since it links it to a person in the public’s mind.

Michael Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, said that institutions have to be careful about whom they agree to be associated with. “I’m not sure anyone would want to have the Bonnie and Clyde Opera Company,” he said.

Sometimes property has to be unnamed. The Vilar Grand Tier at the Metropolitan Opera House, for example, went back to being just the Grand Tier after its benefactor, Alberto W. Vilar, failed to come through on his financial commitments.

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Image: Maya Lin's plan model for Queen Anne Square in Newport, R.I.

You may have missed it during Art Basel. Interesting article. Old vs. New...

"Doris Duke Memorial Plan by Maya Lin Splits Newport"
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NEWPORT, R.I. — When Doris Duke was clearing a patch of derelict buildings here in the late 1970s to create a modest patch of open space known as Queen Anne Square, she was sometimes spotted personally directing the backhoe drivers at dusk, acting as both foreman and steward of the enormous fortune that she lavished on such restoration projects.

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