Quote Originally Posted by mauser View Post
The City of Detroit owns MOST of the {DIA} collection outright via direct purchase. This means that there are no donor restrictions on sale as you have with other famous collections. DIA is unique in that the City was very active in the early years to assemble all those works.

What the City owns is worth billions.
The City Charter says "Dispositions of personal property which are not in the ordinary course of city operations shall be defined by ordinance and are subject to city council control." So, if Dave Bing wants to mobilize Detroit's many billions of dollars of personal property at the DIA to improve the City, he would need the City Council's approval. I suspect the council members would be amenable to a proposal, especially if it lets the City have its Monet and money too [[heck, even the Founders Society should be OK with that).

So, what should Detroit do with its many billions of dollars in assets? If Detroit's billions weren't already tied up in owning artworks, it seems unlikely the City's first priority with a multi-billion dollar fund would be to buy the DIA collection, even if it were all available today and Detroit could actually have the collection and buildings and all for what it had in its checking account. It seems very, very unlikely Detroit would choose to put all its money into artworks today if that left it broke and unable to pay its bills. Yet, Detroit has essentially all its money tied up in artworks and it seems broke and unable to pay its bills, even with all the union and vendor concessions Dave Bing's administration has negotiated by claiming that the City is broke even as it sits on billions of dollars of personal property.

I've argued elsewhere that the City could maintain cultural control of all its art collection and actual possession of most of it and still have use of essentially all the collection's financial value -- many, many billions of dollars -- to generate interest and dividends from a cash endowment. Methods other than mine would let it use all the value with little or no cultural control and possession -- it could sell the artworks outright to restore public safety and health -- or let it use some value with more or less cultural control and possession. Some of these other methods would let it spend the money as it came in, rather than keeping it in an endowment that generates capital income. How many billions should Detroit keep invested in its artworks and how many billions should it use to provide other city services?

Detroit will only go bankrupt if it chooses to remain illiquid. Its assets -- many, many billions of dollars worth of personal property -- make it solvent, and the City of Detroit can choose, with a variety of methods, to be liquid.