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Your Name Could Adorn Tampa's Art

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By DANIEL RUTH, The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 22, 2007

Who would have ever guessed that one of the glorious high points in the history of the Tampa Museum of Art would be the day it closed its doors?

Unfortunately, it's scheduled to reopen.

It was the end of an error last Sunday when the museum at long last closed its doors to its devotees - both of them - in preparation for this mobile home with a gland problem to be demolished early next year.

For the moment the old museum's inventory: the Greek pots and pans antiquities, the finger-painting and the much revered TV Guide collection, has been lovingly placed in storage at Quonset Huts R Us, vigilantly guarded by an aging Pomeranian and rent-a-cops trained by the Barney Fife School of Security.

In time, Tampa's answer to a glorified garage sale will emerge anew in a $33 million building, which will be like spending an insane amount of money to house a Cabbage Patch doll exhibit.

It has always been Tampa's dirty, you're-not-supposed-to-notice artistic secret that its "art" museum is in a class somewhere between paint-by-numbers and Yoko Ono singing the Cole Porter songbook.

Art Chumps

To be sure, the new museum will be bigger, thus allowing for even more truly bad, hideous art to be displayed, thus ensuring Tampa's reputation as the mother of all chumps of the black beret/tortured soul world.

You might say when it comes to Tampa and "art," we are the City of Blights.

But wait! It gets even better.

As part of its capital campaign, the art museum is embarking on an ambitious naming rights effort, offering the chance to stick your moniker on virtually every nook and cranny in the new building - which is a bit like capturing the exclusive opportunity to name a trailer park after yourself.

For example, if you have some spare change in the seat cushions, you could name the whole cockamamie building after yourself for a mere $10 million, which probably has Joe Redner toying with the idea.
Elevator Shaft
Also available at around a million dollars are the rights to name various entrances, plazas, lobbies, even a staircase. For a lousy $100,000, you could stick the name of your pit bull, your mother-in-law, or perhaps your special, imaginary friend Bobo on the reception desk, a corridor, a storage room or the security office.

Indeed, $100,000 will give you the right to name the elevator after yourself, although this space suspects the museum hotsy-tots are reserving the elevator shaft itself for, well, this space.

Altogether, if the museum mandarins persuade enough chumps - er, make that patrons of the arts - to pay to put their names on everything from the building to the men's room hot-air hand dryer, the total take would come close to $90 million.

What would you call that? The Art of the Schlemiel?

If Tampa had the kind of disposable income for the city's swells to name stairwells after themselves, then the art museum long, long ago ought to have had the wherewithal to impose upon those same bluebloods to put ... ahem, real honest-to-goodness art inside the art museum.

Hmmmm, that Joe Redner Tampa Museum of Art doesn't sound so out of place after all.

Keyword: Book of Ruth to read and comment on Daniel Ruth's blog.

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