To many observers, the foundation’s problems stem from the poisonous chemistry among a trio of principals. Fred Hughes, the estate’s executor and a foundation board member, was Warhol’s confidant and business manager from the hedonist heyday in the huge studio called The Factory. Now suffering from multiple sclerosis, Hughes, 49, is a mercurial personality. Just after Warhol’s death Hughes hired the charming Edward Hayes, a former Bronx prosecutor with little estate experience (he was Tom Wolfe’s model for the defense lawyer Tommy Killian in ““Bonfire of the Vanities’’). Then, in 1990, Hughes brought in the urbane Archibald Gillies – who’d run a think tank, the World Policy Institute – as the foundation’s president. It was bad karma: within a year, Gillies says, Hughes’s hostility toward him began and then extended to Hayes. Hayes, 46, has no kind words for either Gillies, 60, or Hughes; Gillies’s feelings are mutual. Says former Interview editor Bob Colacello, ““It’s become a sort of estate class struggle between Arch Gillies who sees himself as the patrician defender of rectitude and Ed Hayes who sees himself as the aggrieved populist. It has nothing to do with Andy Warhol or with art. It has nothing to do with anything but an out-of-control legal battle.''
The first public cannon fire came in 1993, when Hayes sued the estate, asserting it had deliberately undervalued its worth. The lawyer’s contract gives him the same 2 percent of the estate’s value that Hughes received as executor. This past April New York Surrogate Court Judge Eve Preminger quadrupled the assessment of the art holdings originally made by Christie’s to $391 million (the rest of the $510 million estate is land, cash and other assets). The estate countersued, claiming that Hayes had performed so poorly he didn’t deserve the $4.8 million he’d already been paid, let alone the additional $11.5 million he seeks.
First-class trips: Gillies had already been working with a formidable foundation board – including impeccable preservationist and New Yorker critic Brendan Gill and Museum of Modern Art board chairman Agnes Gund – to bring about order. The foundation, then housed in Warhol’s vast studio, at first had the flavor of the old Factory, with lots of the usual hangers-on. Gillies fired a number of them. Before he came on board in 1990, the tales of the Warhol estate’s extravagant expenses – lavish dinners, office redecoration, first-class trips to check out grant proposals – had circulated in the art world (““Absolute rubbish!’’ says Hughes in answer to those rumors). But allegations of mismanagement against the foundation continue to appear, most recently in The New York Times, which reported that in the year ending April 30 the foundation had dispensed a puny $1.1 million in charity while spending $7.2 million to operate.
The foundation’s trustees say those bare numbers are misleading. According to Gill, now president of the board, the foundation has made 620 grants in four years totaling $23 million. Among these, adds Gund, were a crucial $50,000 grant for a Museum of Modern Art show of the abstract artist Robert Ryman unable to attract corporate support, and an additional $25,000 for an exhibition by the political installation artist Fred Wilson. Most visibly, the foundation has pledged $30 million worth of art to the new Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh (the rest of the museum’s Warhols come from the de Menil Foundation). Oddly, the board subsequently ruled against further ““activities directly related to the art of Andy Warhol.''
Yet some activities of board members are surprising. Hughes and at least one former board member reportedly received commissions for selling Warhol’s art on behalf of the estate, but Hughes won’t discuss that. Gund was allowed to buy a book of Warhol’s drawings of lips for $60,000 – much less than some experts say it’s worth (she’s bequeathing the book to MoMA, she says). Answering criticism that the Warhol Foundation gave a $450,000 grant to a pet charity of hers, Studio in a School Association, which sends working artists into impoverished city classrooms, Gund says, ““I wasn’t on the board when the grant was made.’’ She adds ruefully, ““It’s only been since 1990 that I came on the board, but it feels like half a century, like a backache.’’ She’s now resigned, insisting that she ““pre-resigned’’ in January, to join the Getty Foundation’s board.
What’s tougher to explain is why, after four years of Gillies’s guidance, the foundation’s cash has dwindled from $25 million to less than $6 million. Gillies attributes $9 million of the high overhead to the expenses of cataloging, conserving, housing and insuring an art collection as large as MoMA’s. ““When we took over,’’ he says, ““the art was in several different places and some of it was damaged.’’ Much of the $171,000 recently spent on furnishing the foundation’s new rented offices near Soho, he says, are computers to keep track of the art. John Edie of the Council on Foundations defends that sort of expense: ““A foundation [like that] has a fiduciary duty to know what it has and make sure it’s preserved and doesn’t rot somewhere.''
Still, the Warhol Foundation’s track record doesn’t compare favorably with a similar foundation, that of the late homoerotic photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Before he died of AIDS in 1989, Mapplethorpe handpicked a board consistent with his esthetic, and gave the foundation clear causes to support: contemporary photography and a cure for AIDS. Five years later, with only $200 million in total assets, the Mapplethorpe Foundation is among the most visible in the art world, with a gallery and photography program lodged in the Guggenheim Museum. Why hasn’t the Warhol Foundation accomplished something like that?
A big reason, of course, is the drain of the ongoing legal hassles. Hayes, Gillies says, is the real debit. He contends that Hayes screwed up a licensing deal costing the foundation $3 million and botched the sale of Interview – the foundation has never received the $7 million it’s owed for the magazine. Hayes says he can prove that these charges are false. Gillies also believes Hayes is forcing the foundation to spend $2 million (some say the figure is closer to $3 million) on lawyers to keep him from collecting his own whopping legal fee. As far as Hayes is concerned, his suit is more about art history than money: ““It’s astonishing that Gillies’s position in court is that Warhol was not that great an artist.’’ However, the New York state attorney general’s office has investigated the suit – and sided with the foundation in contesting that Hayes earned his fee. The office is also looking into the foundation’s grant-making and salaries.
Good intentions: Paul Alexander, whose book ““Death and Disaster: The Rise of the Warhol Empire and the Race for Andy’s Millions’’ will be published by Random House early in the fall, says the foundation is especially derelict in raising money through selling art. “"[The foundation] won’t tell you the particular pieces,’’ he says. ““It averages out to about $2 million a year, not a lot, quite frankly. These people are losing money at a rate of $4 million a year . . . [Andy] hated lawyers. And now all this money is being eaten up by perks, favors and legal fees.’’ While the charges and countercharges continue, the art world waits to see whether the foundation can unshackle itself from Hayes’s lawsuit, and whether – with all the art now properly cataloged and stored – Gillies can actually run the show. No one wants to see this charitable road, paved with Andy’s good intentions, lead to where smoke is accompanied by something a lot hotter than mirrors.
title: “Smoke And Mirrors” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-03” author: “Emily Beehler”
Last week Bush the son had a chance to make good on that promise in a speech billed by the White House as “a bold new strategy for addressing global climate change.” When he rejected the Kyoto Protocol last year, Bush said he would come up with a better plan than the one agreed to by most of the rest of the world. And here it was, Bush declared: “The Clear Skies Initiative,” and related measures he called “forward and creative thinking.”
Or, perhaps, creative accounting. The central issue in the debate over global warming is how to reduce emissions of so-called greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide produced by burning coal, oil and gasoline. Kyoto calls for mandatory reduction of emissions to less than 1990 levels by the end of this decade. But the Bush administration calls for voluntary measures in the United States to cut what it calls “greenhouse-gas intensity,” defined as a ratio between emissions and gross domestic product. (Under the Bush plan, this would fall from 183 metric tons of emissions per million dollars of GDP in 2002 to 151 metric tons per million dollars by 2012.) The idea is to make a positive link between economic growth and environmental action. Growth “provides the resources for investment in clean technologies,” said Bush, so the plan is just a matter of “common sense.” But when environmentalists applied common arithmetic to the administration’s own projections, they showed actual greenhouse-gas emissions would increase under the Bush plan by almost 30 percent over 1990 levels. According to Eileen Claussen of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, that’s about the same as we’d see with no plan at all. “It’s business as usual,” she said.
Maldivians were not mollified, certainly. Nor were residents of other (low) countries. “It’s simply not enough,” Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok told NEWSWEEK. “It’s a policy that’s not very moral,” said Belgian Energy Minister Olivier Deleuze. The Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel called the administration’s calculations “a fog machine,” but much of the European press simply ignored the plan, or devoted only a few paragraphs to it. Praise, meanwhile, was damn faint: “The fact is positive in itself that the U.S. government realizes that something should be done,” said a spokesman for the European Union. After all, less than a year ago Bush called the link between greenhouse gases and global warming “bad science.” Now “we’re not really sure,” said a spokesperson at the White House. “We believe the science justifies a serious and measured response.”
Reaching even that tentative conclusion was a tortuous process for this administration. Environmentalists don’t carry much weight with the man they’ve dubbed the Toxic Texan. But the big energy companies do, and they sometimes have ferociously competing interests. To sort those out, the president turned most of his cabinet secretaries into a “climate change working group” last year and told them, along with the Council of Economic Advisers and the Council on Environmental Quality, to get cracking.
Big Oil’s influence on the final result is apparent. The linkage of growth and emissions, a strong emphasis on weak voluntary measures, grand funding schemes for new research and solutions like “carbon storage through wise forest and agricultural processes” are all positions advocated in the past two years by executives from Exxon. But these proposals are, for the most part, bright ideas for a distant future, and “one of their main aspects is delay,” says Greenpeace analyst Stephanie Tunmore. Clear Skies picks up on all that. The president suggested that if his initiative is not working it can be re-evaluated… in 2012.
The collapsed energy giant Enron also played a surprising role. The Clear Skies part of the Bush plan calls for a cap on the emissions of sulfur dioxides (SOx), nitrogen oxides (NOx) and mercury from American power plants. Those that produce fewer emissions than the limit would earn credits. Those that produce more could buy those credits. So far, so good. This sort of “cap and trade” system is widely accepted as cost-efficient and effective, and it’s a big part of the Kyoto Protocol.
But Kyoto focuses on carbon dioxide (CO2), which accounts for about 80 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions. Enron, which generated power from relatively clean-burning natural gas, would benefit from caps on CO2 emissions, while dirtier coal-burning power plants–whose owners also have friends at the White House–would suffer. Even more important, Enron saw a huge potential market trading emissions credits, futures and derivatives based on them. Thanks to Kyoto, a global market in carbon-pollution credits is already taking shape. Enron CEO Kenneth Lay helped Fred Krupp, executive director of Environmental Defense, to meet with Bush advisers. During the 2000 campaign, Bush advocated a cap-and-trade scheme for CO2. But he dropped that idea when he became president.
The confusion about carbon has disturbed even some power companies, according to Pew’s Claussen, who consults frequently with the utilities industry. They don’t want to be in a position where they meet the requirements for NOx, SOx and mercury only to discover they have to start all over again with CO2 because, gosh, the getting-better-than-it-used-to-be science shows it really is a serious problem. Ignoring carbon, they have learned, doesn’t make it go away.
The fact that [Bush’s people] have sort of broken through that ball of ignorance among their conservative followers is a positive development and not to be denigrated,” says Stuart Eizenstat, who negotiated the Kyoto Protocol as under secretary of State in the Clinton administration. “But having said that, the program they’ve come up with is woefully inadequate.”
So why did Bush bother at all? And why now? For one thing, public pressure is growing. There’s bipartisan support in the U.S. Senate for much tougher standards than Bush has proposed. The battle is about to be joined, and Bush needs to stake out some high ground. He’s also touring Asia this week, including a visit to Tokyo. The Japanese are important advocates of the Kyoto Protocol, despite the real pain to their economy the plan would inflict. They were instrumental in keeping the Kyoto coalition together through tough negotiating sessions on implementation at Bonn and Marrakech after Washington withdrew. So it stands to reason that Bush wants to appear conciliatory–and see if the Japanese position is softening. If they find his plan persuasive, Kyoto would be dead. Another stop is China, which Kyoto exempts from the tough standards applied to more developed countries. That’s one reason Bush called Kyoto unfair when he pulled out. Might Beijing buy into his creative-accounting concept?
One stop Bush is not planning to make on his tour, however, is the Maldives. Along the crumbling resort beaches there, a rumor is circulating that President Gayoom has made a deal with Australia to take in his people 30 years from now. “In exchange, Australia would get the fishing rights,” says a hotel employee. Tourism Minister Hassan Sobir says that would be the worst possible outcome. “We would be international refugees of an environmental catastrophe,” he says. Gayoom insists, “I have made no deal.” His people will have no need to flee. “God will help us,” he says. “He will.” But heaven had better hurry, because Clear Skies doesn’t look like it will do the trick.
