Western Art in Non-Western Museums

You thought all of those masterpieces were locked away in Swiss bank vaults?

On a recent visit to the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in Iran, the Los Angeles Times' Kim Murphy got to see a trove of modern and contemporary works amassed before the Islamic Revolution, at a time when the country was riding high on oil. Included in the collection are a Chuck Close portrait, six works by Frank Stella, a Jasper Johns lithograph, and a Jackson Pollock drip painting. The museum keeps most of them in the basement, in part because it's not "politically correct" to display them.

The sexual nature of some works, in particular, has been a problem. After the museum's first curator put one of Tom Wesselmann's Great American Nudes on display in the '70s, someone threatened to blow it up if it went on public view again. The museum traded their deKooning Woman III for part of a Persian manuscript in 1994:

"It wasn't just that she was naked. It was showing a woman completely degraded," said Shahriar Adl, an art enthusiast who helped arrange the original swap. "It represents a naked woman as a personification of the devil, as horrible as possible."

A 2005 exhibition — mounted when a more open-minded regime was in power — excluded Renoir's portrait of a woman with her shirt unbuttoned, and authorities demanded that the central panel of a Francis Bacon triptych be removed because it was suggestive of homosexuality.

Herein lies one of the quandaries the art world is going to face as art goes global and places like Dubai and Shanghai obtain licenses to build outposts of some of the world's greatest museums: What is censorship? And what is cultural sensitivity?

I'll leave this an open-ended thread while I'm mulling it over.