Culture Ministry calls out MMCA for 16 counts of shady business practice

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art's Seoul branch in Jongno District, central Seoul [MMCA]

Sixteen instances of illegal or unfair business were found in an audit on the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism announced Monday.

The audit took place from October to December last year.

According to the ministry, the MMCA did not comply with the rules for purchasing artworks and had used government money to pay the museum employees.

Rules on the general process of collecting art state that the museum should rely on the proposals of its in-house curators and up to 50 external specialists, specially chosen by the director. However, the museum drastically cut back its number of outside experts to 11 in 2021.

In other instances, for 26 out of the 279 artworks the MMCA purchased between 2020 and last year, the museum disregarded experts’ advice on the appropriate price. For example, the price of Teresita Fernandez’s “Dark Earth (Cosmos)” (2019) was adjusted by the museum up to 50 million won ($40,150) higher than that advised by the experts.

The ministry found that there are no objective regulations or criteria for the work done by the committee that reviews and finalizes artwork purchases. There are three separate committees — one that assesses the proposed artworks’ value, another that decides on the appropriate price to purchase and the aforementioned one that reviews and finalizes the process — each of which are to be operated independently. However, the ministry found that the members of each committee crossed over into each other’s work, unfairly getting involved.

As for purchasing artworks in auctions, there was a “lack of articulate reason” for the purchases, the ministry said, as only a fraction of the curators were informed about the auction dates and artworks on KakaoTalk, giving the select few “exclusive rights” to propose artwork purchases.

A bidding report is mandatory in order to assess each artwork’s value, but out of 115 proposals, 40 of them were found to have been processed without such documents.

The MMCA was also caught arbitrarily using 32 million won, which was revenue from museum facilities like its cafeterias, parking lots and souvenir shops, to give to their employees as incentives last September.

Laws regarding the National Property Act state that the MMCA Foundation is supposed to calculate their income and expenses once every year and pay the difference to the government coffers.

Other cases include abusing the foundation’s limited rights to signing private contracts. For one of the exhibitions of late Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-hee’s collection, the MMCA purchased and installed lighting via a private contract, when it should have undergone general bids. This “hindered the transparency of the museum’s accounting work,” the ministry said.

The MMCA also failed to take care of its artworks. The late video artist Nam June Paik’s “The More, The Better” (1988) has been exhibited with some among its 1,003 television monitors turned off.

Youn Bum-mo, the director of MMCA, also did not file a report when the museum’s official YouTube channel was hacked last August and remained idle on claims that there are misuses of power among employees.

The ministry stated that it sees “problems within the institution’s operation and the collecting and managing of its art collection” and gave a warning to the MMCA to take measures to resolve them.

BY SHIN MIN-HEE [shin.minhee@joongang.co.kr]