Sight Scene: A Resignation at Phillips Collection

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Express contributor Kriston Capps assesses the resignation of Jay Gates, director of the Phillips Collection.

JAY GATES RAISED THE ROOF of the Phillips Collection, in a literal sense: The director oversaw the museum's 30,000-square-foot expansion, completed last year. But Gates also threw open the doors of the venerable collection by lending works to casinos on the Vegas strip.

What happens in Vegas doesn't always stay in Vegas. The decision to lend principal works from the collection to the Bellagio in 2000 stunned observers, who thought that Gates' decision indicated that the museum was straying too far into the commercial realm. It's hardly that casinos are seedy and historic Dupont Circle townhouses aren't; it's that casinos don't offer the license to hang whatever piece of art that belongs, whereas museums do (or ought to).

As Tyler Green of Modern Arts Notes discussed back in 2004, renting out art is a greater sin for an art institution than any kind of gambling you can get into on the strip.

So it's a somewhat mixed legacy that Gates leaves as he resigns from his position with the institution.

Much of his nine-year tenure was spent mired in the hard, audience-depleting work of making the Sant Wing (named after Phillips patron and former board chair and president Victoria P. Sant) reality and restoring the museum to ship-shape status, an operation that took five years and cost $29 million. Fortunately for the Phillips, during Gates' tenure the museum reportedly raised $30 million. In the year after the construction was completed, the museum drew roughly the same crowd it had before people left.

The expansion itself was marked by some conflict, as neighbors — who were, frankly, being a bit prickly, given that it was an art museum of all things getting the larger footprint in the neighborhood — complained about hours of operation and parking. (There is, categorically speaking, no parking to be had in Dupont in the first place.) But now that the construction is finished, the building has found nothing but praise from critics, for the most part. (The Post's now-retired architecture critic, Benjamin Forgey had a mixed review of the Sant wing, but placed much of the blame on the neighborhood, which demanded that townhouses that house the expansion be preserved, limiting the Phillips from constructing a more innovative space.)

Here's hoping that the next director ensures that the museum's practice lives up to the building's promise.

» "More Art for the Vegas Strip" [Art in America]
» "Museum Ethics, Part Three" [Modern Arts Notes/Arts Journal]
» "Phillips Collection Director Jay Gates Announces His Departure in '08" [WaPo]
» "A Triumphant Return to Form" [WaPo]
» "Dwelling on a Mediocre Past" [WaPo]

Photo of Jay Gates by Carol Pratt/Phillips Collection; Photo of the Phillips Collection, with Sant Wing at far right by Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post