The Louvre became the first major institution to scrub the family’s name, which is all the more striking because opioid abuse is viewed as far more of a crisis in the United States than it is in France.
But the name retains its honored position at a number of American institutions: the Sackler Center for Arts Education at the Guggenheim Museum, the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics at the American Museum of Natural History, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution, the Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among other places. Outside the United States, there is the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University, Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London and more.
The three Sackler brothers, who built what became Purdue Pharma, and their heirs have been prolific donors to the arts and sciences for decades. Several museums, including the Guggenheim and Metropolitan Museum of Art, have said they would no longer accept donations from the family, but neither they nor any other large institution, other than the Louvre, have stripped the name from any wings, galleries or buildings.
That is because removing a name, even one that has become culturally toxic, is an enormously complicated decision, mined with legal, financial and moral concerns. Here are some of those issues:
Big donations come with strings — and contracts
When a museum puts a name on the wall, almost always in exchange for a substantial donation, there is often a legal contract that outlines how long that name has to stay.
In 1973, Avery Fisher, founder of Fisher electronics company, donated $10.5 million to renovate Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall. The agreement included the stipulation that the name Avery Fisher Hall “will appear on tickets, brochures, program announcements and advertisements and the like, and I consent in perpetuity to such use.”
In order to rename the hall, Lincoln Center had to buy out the Fisher family in 2014 for $15 million and promises to feature tributes to Fisher in the new lobby. David Geffen, the entertainment mogul, then stepped in with a $100 million gift to pay for a renovation — and the naming rights to what is now David Geffen Hall.
Geffen also required that his name be used in perpetuity.
In some circumstances, museums have said their contractual obligations mean they have no choice but to keep the name.
In June, Sen. Jeffrey A. Merkley, D-Ore., demanded that the Smithsonian change the name of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, saying the family name “has no place in taxpayer-funded public institutions.” In a letter to Merkley, Lonnie G. Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian, said the donation was made in 1982, and as was its custom at the time, the Smithsonian granted the naming rights in perpetuity.
Bunch said the gift policy was revised in 2011 and now limits naming rights to a term of 20 years or until the next significant renovation of the space. (The Louvre said it was able to act because its policy limits naming rights to 20 years; the wing was named in 1997.)
Michael Ward Stout, a lawyer who has negotiated such deals, said the terms depend “on how much the institution wants the money — and how big are the egos of the donors.”
Some Sackler family members have no ties to OxyContin
Bunch’s letter also pointed out that the gift — which included a collection of more than 1,000 works of Asian art and $4 million — was made more than a decade before OxyContin came on the market. In fact, the man behind the donation, Arthur Sackler, had been dead for nine years when the drug was introduced.
Arthur and his brothers Mortimer and Raymond Sackler bought a small company called Purdue Frederick in 1952 and grew it into a pharmaceutical giant. Arthur’s family sold his stake in the company after his death in 1987. Purdue Pharma was founded in 1991 and released OxyContin five years later.
When the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City announced in May that it would stop accepting Sackler money, it made a careful distinction, saying it did not want gifts from family members tied to Purdue Pharma, leaving the door open to family members who are not.
It also declined to rename its Sackler Wing, home of the popular attraction the Temple of Dendur, saying it was not in a position to make such a permanent change while litigation against the family was ongoing. The attorney general of Massachusetts has accused members of the Sackler family of directing the company’s efforts to mislead the public about how dangerous the drug really was.
The company has said it “neither created nor caused the opioid epidemic,” and denied the allegations.
Museums don’t want to spook other big donors
Nonprofit cultural institutions live or die by their fundraising, especially in an era of declining government support for the arts. So one concern for museums is how taking down the name of one donor will make all the others feel.
“The ‘damnation of memory’ — as the Romans used to call it — of a generous party of the past could have a chilling effect on donors that might be concerned the history of their family, or an individual associated with them, might illicit a rebuke, said Maxwell L. Anderson, a longtime museum leader.
If someone is in an “adventurous part of the economy,” Anderson continued, like genetic engineering or bio farming, it’s difficult to know how that work is going to look in the future. Take Facebook, for example, which was a national darling just a few years ago, and is now being admonished on Capitol Hill.
They want to stay above the fray
Perhaps the trickiest and most fundamental question is where institutions should draw the line. What counts as so morally abhorrent that an association should be erased — and who gets to decide?
The unveiling of the David H. Koch Plaza at the Met was greeted by protesters because, while Koch (and his brother Charles) have been generous to the arts, their influential political giving to conservative candidates and causes has made them reviled on the left.
The decisions by several museums, including the Met and the Guggenheim, to swear off future Sackler donations came after demonstrations led by Nan Goldin, a photographer who overcame an OxyContin addiction. She has also called on museums to ditch the Sackler name, and she protested at the Louvre just a few days before it did so.
Daniel H. Weiss, president of the Met, was careful to say during the Sackler announcement that it was an extreme circumstance, and that political protests would not be treated the same way. Given that many donors to the arts are wealthy conservatives, Weiss was both drawing a line for the museum to abide by and reassuring patrons that their checks would not be turned away on account of party affiliation.
“We are not a partisan organization, we are not a political organization, so we don’t have a litmus test for whom we take gifts from based on policies or politics,” Weiss said. “If there are people who want to support us, for the most part we are delighted.”
Indeed, some of the most generous patrons of past generations had reputations that many people today would find objectionable, like Henry Clay Frick or Andrew Carnegie.
“Are we meant to rename the Frick because Henry Clay Frick was a union-buster?” Anderson said, referring to the museum on Fifth Avenue. “What are the limits of retrospective institutional cleansing?”
In addition to moral questions, there is a more practical calculation: How enraged is the public at the person in question?
“I do believe there is a level of pragmatism at work here,” said Tom Eccles, the executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. “Museums very much consider the level of public outrage before taking the drastic step of taking someone’s name off a building.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.