The New York Metropolitan will sell funds to reduce the income deficit due to the covid-19 pandemic

Visitors to the entrance of the Met, on September 6 NOAM GALAI

The economic impact of the pandemic does not respect even the most venerable cultural institutions in the US.

The closures of the economic activity and an activity to idle by the collapse of the tourism and the limitation of the capacity have pushed the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York (Met, in its English abbreviation), the largest in the country, to initiate conversations with auction houses and collection curators to sell works and cover an anticipated deficit of $ 150 million (about € 125 million).

It is not the first drastic measure that the institution adopts, after, last spring, 81 employees were fired and the president and CEO and their director cut their salaries by 20%.

The rest of the board of directors saw their emoluments reduced by 10%.

Although currently open to the public, what before the pandemic was one of the most visited tourist attractions in the city suffers from the lack of visitors, and the sharp drop in income complicates both the conservation of its funds and the expansion works from the institution's flagship, the Fifth Avenue building, with a new wing that juts out into Central Park.

The MET has two other venues, the Met Breuer, for contemporary art, and the Met Cloisters, north of Manhattan and dedicated to medieval European art and architecture.

The three venues had to close to the public on March 13 in the first wave of the pandemic, when New York was ground zero for the virus in the US.

Its reopening, on August 29 - one month later than expected - left behind a gap in income that was difficult to overcome, which has forced the deficit forecast to be reassessed.

The museum also had to suspend its 150th anniversary celebrations in June.

“We must consider all the options.

None of us have a clear perspective on how the pandemic will evolve, and that is why it would be inappropriate not to consider it [the sale of works] while we are still in the dark, "Max Hollein, director of the Met, told

.

Despite the efforts of the new Administration to combat the pandemic, the data on the incidence of the virus in the country (almost 450,000 deaths, 26.5 million cases) cloud any forecast, not to mention optimism.

To mitigate the economic impact on the budget of the institutions, the Association of Directors of Art Museums has modified its scrupulous rules to dispose of works in exchange for liquidity, relaxing for two years a procedure that until the onset of the pandemic was much more strict, and today it is the subject of controversy.

Because it is not only the Met that is forced to monetize part of its funds, but also the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Everson Museum of Art in Syracusa (New York State), the Newfields in Indianapolis and, more recently, the Baltimore Museum of Art, with a liquidation plan estimated at 65 million dollars that has caused great controversy.

While the board of directors of the professional association maintains that selling works can be almost forced in certain circumstances, some specialists consider that it is a wrong and immoral measure.

Previously, the newspaper recalls, museums could only use such funds to reinvest in new acquisitions.

But last spring, coinciding with the closure of economic activity in most of the country due to the coronavirus, it announced that until April 2022, institutions that use the proceeds from the sale of funds to maintain and preserve your collections.

In this way, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the first to take advantage of the moratorium, has received 31 million dollars since the fall, thanks to the auction of pieces in the US and Europe.