I found this yesterday when I was querying for a doc. These guys had to be on drugs. They were part of the Austin Museum of Art Board. The Museum that was never built (but great sums of money donated to see it built…). Most of the same drug-users are on the board of it’s newish resurrection: The Austin Contemporary. Which likewise, hasn’t built a museum. The board used the monies given to build a New Museum to operate the old museum. (Which didn’t own any real art and and was located in the mezzanine of a bank! Nice racket, eh? Go Ponzi!) The board, however, with all of it’s intellectual horsepower, didn’t have the capacity to figure out that the operating expenses, if a new Museum was built, would go from $3M (which they could barely afford) to a totally unsustainable $9M. The boardroom always had this feeling of deck chairs being constantly re-arranged while the luxury liner was listing aimlessly under it’s own portliness of impossibly bad leadership.
My British friends always say that if you lay with dogs; you get fleas. Cozy in there isn’t it?