Ministry of Culture trashes its own Guggenheim assessment

“It was scraped together terribly quickly.”
      “Sources are haphazard.”
      “It’s a kind of a patchwork quilt.”
      The assessment released on Friday by the Ministry of Education and Culture on the Guggenheim museum that has been proposed for Helsinki came under heavy criticism - from the ministry itself.
     
The criticism came out in a telephone interview with Hannele Lehto, the head of the ministry’s arts unit.
      Minister of Culture and Sport Paavo Arhinmäki (Left Alliance) says that Lehto herself was the main author of the assessment.
     
Since the publication of the ministry’s assessment on Friday, many deficiencies that had been pointed out by Helsingin Sanomat had been corrected in the online version.
      According to Lehto, the wrong version was published by mistake. “Now corrections have been made.”
      For instance, the ministry has revised its claim that the Guggenheim Foundation spent 24.7 million US dollars on its Bilbao Museum, and invested 44.5 million dollars on its art collection.
      In fact, the Guggenheim Foundation got 24.7 million dollars when the Bilbao Museum was built. Guggenheim Foundation director Richard Armstrong said that the foundation has paid for only half of the cost of one work of art, a work by Robert Rauschenberg, with the Bilbao establishment paying the other half. The rest of the Bilbao collection is the property of the museum itself.
     
Although the ministry has modified the text, Eleanor Goldhar, the Foundation’s deputy director, says that there are still mistakes.
      “There probably are still some factual errors. This was made at the request of the ministry, and in great haste”, Lehto admits.
     
For instance, the ministry suggests that the foundation has drawn up reports on museum concepts with about ten different cities since 2000.
      “If the money spent in these locations on studies is comparable with the two million euros spent on the Guggenheim Helsinki report, the income of the foundation’s consulting services will have been about 20 million in ten years”, the ministry estimated without checking the matter with the Foundation.
      The sentence disappeared from the online version of the ministry’s report soon after Helsingin Sanomat asked about this item. However, a long list of cities whose projects had been “unrealised” was left. Eleanor Goldhar says that the Guggenheim Foundation has never drafted any such assessments of many of the cities referred to by the ministry.
     
The ministry’s assessment includes unattributed quotations from a pamphlet on the Guggenheim project compiled by researcher Kaarin Taipale.
      Taipale writes: “In addition to the Guggenheim that was designed by star architect Frank Gehry, and which was opened in 1997, a metro was opened in the city, whose stations were designed by an even bigger star, British architect, Sir Norman Foster.”
      The ministry repeats the sentence verbatim, as if it were its own assessment.
     
“As a researcher I always appreciate it if sources are mentioned”, Taipale says in a telephone interview.
      It is also revealed that the error involving the 24.7 million dollars in the ministry’s report was the result of an imprecise quotation of the direct sentence. Hannele Lehto admits that Taipale’s work was the source.
     
Minister of Culture and Sport Paavo Arhinmäki, were you aware of the factual errors made by the ministry in the report?
      “That is what I have been told. It is human, considering that many questions were left open by the report by the Guggenheim Foundation, which cost two million euros, and I asked the civil servants to look into them under a tight schedule. This is not a question of taking a stand. We have just asked some questions that need to be cleared up.”
     
You said in an interview with STT that “with this information I would not be able, as a member of the City Council, to sign a blank cheque”. Did you commission the assessment in order to play politics as a city councillor with the help of the resources of the ministry?
      “Ha ha. I am a member of the City Council, a Member of Parliament, and a minister. I asked for this because the ministry has been asked for up to 70 million euros and an increase in state subsidies. The report shows that open questions remain, and that we need more information about them before a single member of the Helsinki City Council can decide on this”, Arhinmäki says.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Working group favours construction of Guggenheim museum in Helsinki (11.1.2012)
  Helsinki could get its own Guggenheim (18.1.2011)
  Guggenheim decision to be postponed (27.1.2012)
  Launch of Guggenheim project would cost nearly 5 million (18.1.2012)
  Opponents of Guggenheim gather forces (17.1.2012)