The Board of Trustees: Museum of Modern Art
I guess crime doesn't matter if you got billions.
As my last thing for Welcome to Business School, I created a performance lecture called Global Network: Circles of Corruption in the Art Market. (It’s not really a lecture because I didn’t go terribly deep and it’s not quite a performance because I was mostly being me.) In this piece, I linked 50 or so people at the high end of the art world through various scandals. It was recorded by my friend Tallon Jackson, and he did a great job. You can see it here.
At one point in the performance, I talked about some of the members of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) board of trustees in New York, and I thought it might be interesting to look at ALL the people listed on the board because this one of the most important museums in the United States. In the video, I joke about there being 20 people on the board, but it’s actually over 50, and most of them are billionaires. This is not surprising considering one of the requirements of board membership at this level is a hefty donation by the trustee or their friends. I’ll be honest with you, I think billionaires are inherently bad because there is no way to amass that kind of money without exploiting somebody, and usually a lot of somebodies. Philanthropy is also pretty complicated at this level. Rich people support what they think is important, which causes their concerns to take precedence over everyone else's, even if what they want is self-serving and/or dumb.
The membership of this board matters because it has an outsized influence on the art world, which, as I have discussed, has real-world effects on the rest of us. A lot of these people are dead boring or have little written about them, but I have done my best to gather basic information on them for your edification. Of course there are some scandals, and there is no way I caught all or even most of them. Two of them are friends of Jeffery Epstein, some are profiteers, one is a dude found guilty of bribery, and there’s a little inside trading to spice things up. A lot of trustees are wives of investment bros, and since their board service is being used to whitewash their husband’s dastardly deeds, I have included spouse information when appropriate. Trustees of note are italicized. Also, please note the compensation package for Museum Director Glenn Lowry. I am shaking my dang head.
Sources can be found here.
Chair: Marie-Josée Kravis (74)
Marie-Josée Kravis is a Canadian economist on a bunch of boards, including the International Advisory Committee of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and, of course, MoMA. Climate activists are currently trying very hard to get her kicked off the MoMA board because she is married to billionaire Henry Kravis, the co-founder of KKR – a global investment company with a lot of money in fossil fuels. Kravis is returning to the role of chair after a short term by Leon Black, who had to leave the job because of his relationship with Jeffery Epstein. He’s still listed as being on the board though, so I’ll get to him in a bit.
President: Ronnie Heyman (75)
Ronnie Heyman is the widow of investor and businessman Samuel J. Heyman. She is a graduate of Yale Law School.
Vice Chair: Sid R. Bass (81)
Sid Bass is a billionaire investor and philanthropist who is described as a stand-up guy by almost everyone who talks about him. He’s more famous for his two divorces than any real scandals, and most people consider him to be a modest and principled guy. I’d counter that with the fact that he’s good friends with Henry Kissinger. (I think Kissinger is a horrible person. If you want an example, in the 1970s, the military junta in power in Argentina believed they had the blessing of the United States to kidnap and torture their own citizens because Secretary of State Kissinger indicated there wasn’t going to be a problem with it on our end.) Bass and his brothers inherited a couple of million from their uncle, and all four were able to parlay that money into billions. Probably his biggest scandal was right after 9/11 when he had to sell a crap ton of Disney stocks because he had a $2 billion margin call. (People can buy things on margin, which means that they borrow money to purchase an investment. A margin call is when the value of that investment goes under an agreed amount, and the investor has to pump more money into that account to make up the difference. Otherwise, the lender would take all the risk and not the person making the actual investment.) Anyway, he’s got billions and likes art. Nepo baby.
Vice Chair: Mimi Haas (77)
Mimi Haas is the billionaire widow of Peter Haas, the great-grandnephew of Levi Strauss the denim dude. In 2022 she donated $100,000 to help defeat California Proposition 30 which would have created a 1.75% tax on income over $2 million to fund electric vehicle and wildfire prevention. Nepo wife.
Vice Chair: Marlene Hess (?)
Marlene Hess was (is?) in banking and is married to James D. Zirin, who is an author, lawyer, and PBS show host. Her dad owned the NY Jets at some point, which is a sports thing I guess. I don’t think they are billionaires, and he wrote a book about Trump-related lawsuits. They hang out with a bad crowd, but they might be okay. Nepo baby.
Vice Chair: Maja Oeri (68)
Maja Oeri is a billionaire heiress descended from Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche, the founder of the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche, and the members of her family own a little more than 50% of shares in this company. (She has around 5%.) Roche is responsible for drugs like Valium and Rohypnol and is the current owner of Genentech. In addition to the regular annoying pharma stuff, in 1976 Roche was responsible for a large Dioxin contamination in Italy and in 1999 they had to pay $500 million dollars to the U.S. government when they were found guilty of a vitamin price-fixing scheme. Nepo baby.
Director: Glenn D. Lowry (68)
Glenn Lowry has been the director of MoMA since 1995 and he makes about $2 million a year, plus he gets to live for free in a $6 million apartment on the museum premises. He used to get additional money from the New York Fine Arts Support Trust — totaling around $5 million, and I think they are the actual owners of the apartment he lives in. This trust was founded by David Rockefeller and Agnes Gund with the sole purpose of convincing him and one other guy to work for MoMA. The Average museum director makes $343,600, and as of Oct 16, MoMA is raising its prices to $30 for a regular admission ticket. Lowry has overseen a few expansion projects during his tenure, and I guess somebody’s got to pay for it. (I go back and forth on museum ticket prices. On one hand, it would be great if we didn’t have billionaires dictating what good art is. On the other hand, not having a donor system would make tickets completely unaffordable. It’s a conundrum! An increase in government funding doesn’t seem super possible in this climate.) Every once in a while, people make some noise about being scandalized by this situation, but MoMA keeps on keeping on with it.
Treasurer: Edgar Wachenheim III (85? 86?)
Finance bro. Donates a lot of money. Likes the library. I also like the library.
Assistant Treasurer: James Gara (?)
Chief Operating Officer of MoMA since 2000, although he’s been there since 1982. In 2013 he made $1.2 million.
Secretary: James E. Grooms (?)
He’s been the MoMA general counsel since 2020.
Sarah Arison (38ish)
Arison is President of the Arison Arts Foundation and the co-executive producer of the film The Price of Everything, which I recommend. It might almost be more interesting for what it doesn’t say than what it does, but still, it’s entertaining. She is also the granddaughter of the dude who founded Carnival Cruise Lines. She supposedly has no art in storage — it’s all on her walls. (Good on her if that is true.) Nepo baby.
Alexandre Arnault (31)
Arnault is the son of Bernard Arnault, the founder and CEO of LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton) and sometimes the richest man in the world. (That honor changes from day to day depending on how all the other bazillionaires are doing.) He interned at KKR and is currently the executive vice president of product and communications at Tiffany and Co. Nepo baby.
Lawrence B. Benenson (Mid-50s maybe?)
Benenson is a real estate investor and third-generation partner of Benenson Capital Partners. He was also a co-executive producer of the film The Price of Everything. Nepo baby.
Leon D. Black (72)
For a brief period between 2018 and 2021 billionaire Leon Black was the chair of the MoMA, but had to resign — from the museum and his private equity firm Apollo Equity Management — because of his ties to sex trafficker and all-around gross dude Jeffery Epstein. He paid him $158 million for “tax and estate advisory services.” Seems like a lot, but what do I know? Black’s art collection is worth over a billion dollars, and Epstein may have had a hand in that as well. (As a note, Black also bought the artbook company Phaidon in 2012.) He’s got 3 of his very own rape accusations, and earlier this year he “...agreed to pay $62.5 million to the U.S. Virgin Islands in January to be released from any potential claims arising out of the territory’s three-year investigation into the sex trafficking operation of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein…” For whatever reason, he is still listed on the MoMA website as a regular trustee. Maybe they don’t want to risk losing his large donations by scrubbing him from the board entirely.
David Booth (77)
Co-Founder Dimensional Fund Advisors in Texas.
Clarissa Alcock Bronfman (?)
Bronfman is the daughter of a Venezuelan oil executive and is married to Edgar Bronfman. If his surname sounds familiar, two of his sisters were involved with (and funded) Keith Raniere and NXIVM. He is one of the Seagram’s heirs and my favorite quote about him is that he is “...the most stupid person in the media business.” Supposedly he lost his family $3 billion dollars from bad business decisions and got busted for insider trading. Clarissa is also a jewelry designer, and I, uh, kinda like her stuff. Nepo baby and nepo wife.
Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (?)
Also Venezuelan, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros is married to billionaire media mogul Gustavo Cisneros who was accused of participating in the 2002 Venezuelan coup d'état attempt against Hugo Chavez. Patricia is dedicated to education and has donated a lot of Latin American art to MoMA. (Nepo wife)
Steven Cohen (67)
Billionaire Cohen owns 97.2% of the New York Mets (Baseball?) and is the founder of hedge fund Point72 Asset Management. His previous company, S.A.C. Capital Advisors, was fined $1.8 billion for insider trading. He had to shut down that company and was not allowed to manage other people’s money for a couple of years.
Edith Cooper (62)
Cooper is currently a director at Amazon.com and is a former executive vice president of Goldman Sachs.
Paula Crown (64)
I will just quote this from her website: “Artist, advocate, philanthropist, and entrepreneur Paula Crown navigates internal and external dimensions of being, from the center to the surface and everything in between.” She used to be a vice president at Salomon Brothers and then worked for a long time for her family’s investment business, Henry Crown and Company. She is the widow of James Crown and has a graduate degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Nepo baby and nepo wife.
David Dechman (63?)
Dechman is the CEO and co-founder of Summit Rock Advisors. (Investment bro.) He collects and supports photography. He was a chemical engineer until he went to Harvard Business School.
Anne Dias Griffin (53)
Investment lady bro. Harvard MBA. Born in France. Used to be married to a billionaire. Previous nepo wife.
Glenn Dubin (66)
Billionaire hedge fund manager (retired) seemed like a really boring guy until I read that he was also good friends with Jeffery Epstein. His wife, physician and founder of the Dubin Breast Center at the Tisch Cancer Institute, Eva Andersson-Dubin used to date Epstein in the 80s, and as a family, they visited him frequently — even after Epstein was a convicted sex offender. Andersson-Dubin even testified for the defense at Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial. Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre stated she had sex with Dubin at the direction of Maxwell.
Lonti Ebers (?)
Married to billionaire investment bro Bruce Flatt. Opened a nonprofit space, Amant, in Brooklyn. It hosts residencies and exhibitions (not of things in her collection) that are free to the public. Nepo wife.
Joel S. Ehrenkranz (?)
Lawyer and investment bro married to art historian and photographer Anne Ehrenkranz.
John Elkann (47)
This billionaire Italian chairs Ferrari and Stellantis and is the CEO of Exor. Exor is a Dutch Holding company and Stellantis is the parent company of Abarth, Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, Citroën, Dodge, DSFiat, Fiat, Professional, Jeep, Lancia, Maserati, Mopar, Opel, Peugeot, Ram, and Vauxhall. He’s also got some sports ties but, it’s too boring for me to write down. Don’t care. He and his mom had some sort of legal squabble about an inheritance. I also don’t care about that. Elkann and his wife Lavinia Borromeoare are both super nepo babies. His brother once faked his own kidnapping.
Laurence Fink (70)
Fink is the Billionaire CEO of the very, very large investment management firm, BlackRock. He’s been hassled recently by Republicans who take umbrage at his company’s attempts at climate change mitigation by supporting “green” investments. The left is pissed at him for talking a big game and not delivering. Looks to me like he’s waffling since DeSantis pulled Florida’s money out of BlackRock. Fink is also a big crypto supporter even after the FTX collapse. Crypto is for douches.
Glenn Fuhrman (Maybe 58? I dunno.)
Finance bro who likes art.
Kathleen Fuld (?)
Kathleen Fuld is the wife of former Lehman Brothers CEO, Dick Fuld. You may remember how their bankruptcy kicked off the 2008 financial crisis. There are many books written about, and I recommend A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers by Lawrence G. McDonald and Patrick Robinson.
Agnes Gund (85)
Heiress to a banking fortune, Gund has done a lot to support the arts and other causes like prison reform in New York. On paper, she seems cool, but her machinations to attract Glenn Lowry to MoMA (see Lowry entry) strike me as questionable. I don’t really know enough to speculate too much. She is generally adored, and I don’t want to cast a shadow where none belongs. Nepo baby.
AC Hudgins (?)
Articles on Hudgins only mention that he is a Black collector on various boards. I would like to know more about him.
Barbara Jakobson (90)
SHE IS THE MOTHER OF MAGGIE WHEELER WHO PLAYED JANICE ON FRIENDS. She was also friends with a lot of artists including Robert Mapplethorpe, and is one of the few people on this list who actually seems kind of interesting. Nepo wife.
Pamela Joyner (66)
Harvard MBA. Does marketing for investment bros. Co-founded the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums. Married to an investment bro.
Jill Kraus (?)
Kraus has an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and was a designer for 20 years. She is married to Peter Kraus, chairman and CEO of the asset management company Aperture Investors. Nepo wife.
Ronald S. Lauder (79)
Lauder, along with his brother Leonard, is a billionaire heir to the Estée Lauder fortune. He is a longtime friend of Donald Trump, although according to my sources, he won’t be donating to a 2024 Trump presidential campaign. He is, in fact, the person who suggested to Trump that the U.S. buy Greenland. Denmark was not into it. Big time nepo baby.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad (51)
Professor Muhammad teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School and has written a book, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, about the development of the idea that African Americans are criminals by nature. He’s kind of a nepo baby in the sense that he is the grandson of Elijah Muhammad, the former leader of the Nation of Islam. (Dr. Muhammad is not a member, FYI.) I don’t really think this conferred any advantages beyond being a talking point. He seems pretty interesting.
Philip S. Niarchos (69)
Niarchos is the Greek Billionaire heir of shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos. He is a big-time nepo baby, and is also the father-in-law of Dasha Zhukova, who used to be married to Russian Oligarch Roman Abramovich.
James G. Niven (78)
According to his LinkedIn page, Niven is the chairman of Jamie Niven LLC and they, “Advise and assist collectors in selling fine art at auction or privately. Introduce collectors to potential finance options in affiliation with Athena Art Finance.” Before that, he worked at Sotheby’s auction house in a number of roles, including Chairman, Americas. His father was David Niven the actor, and thus he is a nepo baby.
Peter Norton (79)
Norton is the computer programmer originally behind Norton’s Antivirus software.
Daniel S. Och (62)
Hegefund billionaire. In 2016 he was fined $2.2 million and his company $413 million for paying bribes to officials in “Libya, Chad, Niger, Guinea and the Democratic Republic of Congo.” Turns out, in 1977 the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was enacted to make it illegal for businesses to pay bribes overseas, even if it is considered standard operating procedure.
Eyal Ofer (73)
Billionaire shipping magnate with interests in real estate, energy, and technology concerns. Nepo baby.
Michael S. Ovitz (76)
Co-founder of Creative Artists Agency (CAA), he also got fired from running Disney. He sues people a lot and gets sued a lot. Some people just live that kind of life.
Emily Rauh Pulitzer (90?)
Emily Pulitzer is the widow of Joseph Pulitzer Jr. She has a master's degree in art history from Harvard and worked as a curator at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, as well as the St. Louis Art Museum. (It’s kinda hard to get specific info on her after she married.) Nepo baby and nepo wife
Sharon Percy Rockefeller (78)
Rockefeller is the former first lady of West Virginia, and her husband is one of the famous(ly rich) Rockefeller family. She was also the chairwoman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and at one time, according to her Wikipedia page, she was on the steering committee for the Bilderberg Group, which I think is a private group of rich and/or powerful people who meet and talk about capitalism or whatever. I dunno. Conspiracy theorists on both sides LOVE talking about these folks. Nepo baby and nepo wife.
Richard Roth
There are 1 million dudes named Richard Roth including an artist, an investment bro, and a lawyer. For the life of me, I cannot figure out which one is on this board. Maybe they all take turns.
Richard E. Salomon (?)
Investment bro who used to advise David Rockefeller.
Anna Marie Shapiro (?)
Married to finance bro Robert F. Shapiro. Nepo wife.
Anna Deavere Smith
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH IS AN AMERICAN TREASURE. She’s an actress and playwright, and while she’s good in her mainstream gigs, her plays are where it’s at. Check her out!
Jerry I. Speyer
He’s a billionaire New York real estate dude. Of course, he got caught up in the 2008 mortgage crisis and defaulted (along with BlackRock) on bazillion-dollar loans for Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village.
Jon Stryker (65)
Billionaire architect heir to medical device company Stryker Corporation. He is the founder and president of the Arcus Foundation which focuses on LGBT issues and great ape conservation. The National Catholic Register accused him of donating to the ACLU to “...limit religious freedom and funding for Christian groups…” by funding efforts to reduce religious exemptions to anti-discrimination laws. He also “backs groups which undermine Christian sexual morals” by supporting abortion, gay marriage, and trans rights. Good on him. Nepo baby.
Daniel Sundheim (46)
Investment bro billionaire. Was short selling GameStop stocks right as the internets decided to go GameStop crazy. (In short selling you borrow stocks and sell them. You expect the price to go down so you can repurchase them for less than you sold. You pocket the difference. If the price goes up, you pay the difference, and in this case, it was a lot.)
Tony Tamer (65)
Billionaire investment bro. Some of the companies owned by his company H.I.G. Capital are basically prison profiteers (Keefe Group, LLC and Wellpath.) There’s a lot of weird stuff on the internets where you have to dig down several layers to find his involvement. H.I.G. has also settled an accusation of pushing a company (Silentnight) towards failure so they could buy it for firesale prices. I am sure there are more scandals of note.
Steven Tananbaum (58?)
Hedge fund billionaire. He sued Larry Gagosian for failing to deliver 3 Jeff Koons sculptures. Koons is known to be a pokey puppy, and I guess Tananbaum got tired of waiting. They settled out of court. Also, his company owns a lot of Puerto Rican debt and made money after Hurricane Maria. More profiteering.
Alice M. Tisch (59?)
Married to nepo baby finance bro Thomas J Tisch. Nepo wife.
Xin Zhang (58)
Billionaire real estate mogul. She used to be a finance lady bro.
That’s it for this month! In the next issue, I will be talking about my MFA experience and tying it into all of this art and business stuff.
Great work
Well done!