{"id":1978,"date":"2009-11-23T11:53:30","date_gmt":"2009-11-23T15:53:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/?p=1978"},"modified":"2009-11-23T11:53:30","modified_gmt":"2009-11-23T15:53:30","slug":"polaroid-collection-update-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/2009\/11\/23\/polaroid-collection-update-8\/","title":{"rendered":"Polaroid Collection: Update 8"},"content":{"rendered":"

What Did Polaroid Know, and When Did Polaroid Know It? (continued)<\/strong><\/p>\n

In my previous post<\/a>, I presented evidence indicating that the Polaroid Corporation has always known that it didn’t own outright most of the works in its collection. Let me continue by exploring briefly the implications and ramifications of that possibility in the current situation.<\/p>\n

\"logo-1\"<\/a>The shell entity now in possession of the Polaroid Collection, legally (and confusingly) known as the Polaroid Corporation, is composed of debtors left holding the bag when Petters International imploded in 2008<\/a>. They’ve already sold off the Polaroid brand, its IP, and other assets to an entity known as PLR IP Holdings, LLC<\/a>, which bought everything except<\/em> the Polaroid Collection from them in April 2009, and will continue to manufacture and sell products under the Polaroid name.<\/p>\n

Here’s the April 17, 2009 “Revised Notice of Prevailing Bidder” from the Minnesota Bankruptcy Court<\/a>, which rubber-stamps that sale and validates the exclusion of the Polaroid Collection from the list of acquired assets. Attached to it is Schedule 1.2(q), which itemizes the 15,934 works officially included in the collection at that point \u2014 and which PLR IP Holdings, LLC chose not to acquire, for undisclosed reasons<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"William<\/a>

William of Ockham<\/p><\/div>\n

Now, to finalize settling their debts, and to avoid accumulating new ones before dissolving, the Polaroid Corporation\u00a0seeks to dispose of the Polaroid Collection for cash, claiming that storage and maintenance of the collection costs them upwards of $400K per year. So they desperately want to end their expensive involvement with this unique asset \u2014\u00a0for which, remarkably, its uniqueness notwithstanding, they assert that they have never received even a single “formal bid.”\u00a0This seemingly inexplicable absence of interest in the collection from the photo\/art market begs for the application of the Occam’s Razor principle: The simplest answer is usually the right one<\/em>. But simple doesn’t mean simple-minded, or na\u00efve, or ingenuous, or credulous.<\/p>\n

Take Marion Maneker’s “Polaroid Wants to Go to Auction,”<\/a> a piece subtitled “No One Offered Privately on the Polaroid Collection. Why?” and published by Art Market Monitor<\/em> online on August 13th, 2009, just weeks before before the Minnesota Bankruptcy Court hearing that authorized the sale at auction of the collection<\/a>. In the article, Maneker phrases his question thus: “Does the photography market lack deep pockets willing to buy a big collection?” This narrows his inquiry strictly to the issue of asking price (which figure the current owners of the collection have never made public). Maneker next takes at face value a statement from the Polaroid Corporation quoted from the Wall Street Journal<\/a><\/em>: “Polaroid said that its own attempts to find buyers for the art had attracted interest from individuals, investors and institutions, but that it had yet to receive any formal bids.” And he concludes from this, “In other words, no one had the money or wanted to take the risk in buying so many photographs.”<\/p>\n

\"Qatar<\/a>

Qatar Museum of Photography (maquette)<\/p><\/div>\n

As I stated in my previous post<\/a>, that represents neither sound reasoning nor investigative journalism.\u00a0We know that, the current meltdown notwithstanding, there’s more than enough money afloat in the art world to make acquisition of the plum Polaroid Collection by some truly interested party\u00a0easily affordable at its estimated auction value of $8-12 million USD, certainly at the necessarily lower asking price for the collection as a whole. (I include in this prognosis potential purchasers from the Middle East, where new major photo collections have begun to emerge and new museums of photography are getting conceived and built, such as the one in Qatar, designed by Santiago Calatrava.)<\/p>\n

\"Museum<\/a>

Museum of Photography, Qatar<\/p><\/div>\n

The Polaroid Collection is truly and literally unique; not only is it an enormous, synergistic, one-of-a-kind\u00a0archive of half a century’s creative work with a specific set of photographic tools, materials, and processes by hundreds of artists and photographers, but the vast majority of the 16,000 works it contains are one-of-a-kind pieces. It would form the cornerstone for any emerging museum collection, or serve as centerpiece and major enhancement for an existing repository. Properly managed and promoted, it would make the institution\u00a0that housed it into what’s now called a destination venue \u2014 especially given the surprisingly widespread nostalgia for all things Polaroid (in the product line’s analog forms).<\/p>\n

In short, the Polaroid Collection is highly desirable and, even at the high end of Sotheby’s estimate, reasonably priced.\u00a0Given that a single Steichen print went for close to $3 million just a few years back, and a single Gursky sold for over $3 million shortly thereafter, the notion that no one in what Maneker calls “the photography market”\u00a0can afford to buy the Polaroid Collection\u00a0is laughable on its face.<\/p>\n

\"Whitney<\/a>

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York<\/p><\/div>\n

For some reason, Maneker elected not to pose his key question to anyone save himself. He didn’t ask anyone at PLR IP Holdings, LLC why they chose to acquire everything but<\/em> the Polaroid Collection from remnants of the Petters company. He didn’t ask David Ross, former former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, why the Whitney didn’t take the collection<\/a> when it was offered to them as a donation sometime in the 1990s. \u00a0He didn’t call any of the major institutions that would seem likely to find acquisition of this archive worth considering. (I’ve heard, from an anonymous source, that both the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston wanted it, but that both deals were scotched by people inside the Polaroid Corporation.)<\/p>\n

If (pace<\/em> Maneker)\u00a0price is no object, then what is?<\/p>\n

This brings me to the logical conclusion that every potential buyer \u2014 “individuals, investors and institutions” \u2014 has discovered in examining the collection’s documentation that the bulk of it is contractually encumbered in ways that prohibit (or at least problematize) its sale, thus also making perilous its purchase as a whole. (For samples of the Polaroid Collection’s release forms and letters of agreement with photographers and artists, click here.<\/a>) If that’s true, then all prospects have had good reason to back off and not bid on the collection.<\/span><\/p>\n

Note: At the urging of George H. Singer of the Minneapolis law firm Lindqvist & Vennum, legal counsel to John R. Stoebner, the court-appointed Chapter 7 Trustee in the PBE Corporation bankruptcy proceeding, I hereby retract the above passage, as indicated by the strikethrough. In its place, I substitute the following, as indicated in italics:<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are numerous possible reasons for any given institution’s decision (past, present, or future) not to acquire this collection.<\/em><\/p>\n