Mary Tutwiler

Museum directors trash talk Superbowl match up

by Mary Tutwiler

It’s not only politicians and sports fans talking trash and laying bets on the Super Bowl. You might think museum directors are too high minded to watch football, but you’d be wrong to count out art aficionados. It turns out New Orleans Museum of Art director E. John Bullard has Twittered some smack to Indianapolis Museum of Art director Max Anderson. The result, a bet based on museum loans — a prize painting traveling to the winning team’s home museum for several months.

What began as a wager over the exchange of an Ingrid Calame painting from IMA up against a Renoir belonging to NOMA has escalated into IMA’s prized JMW Turner landscape, The Fifth Plague of Egypt, for NOMA’s exquisite Claude Lorrain, Ideal View of Tivoli. The entire fast and furious series of tweets can be followed here.