Silas Marti, “Rio espera resposta da Casa Daros sobre resgate public,” Folha de S. Pablo, May 22, 2015 →.
I should give a full disclosure here to avoid later accusations: my work is in the Daros Collection, I had a big exhibition organized by the collection that travelled through seven countries, I helped organize a symposium on literacy for them, I am working on a pedagogical project for the last exhibition (featuring Cuban artists from the collection), and I am friends with all the employees, curators past and present, as well as with the owner of the collection, Ruth Schmidheiny.
Much of the endowment wealth of respected foundations (e.g., the Guggenheim Foundation) came from the activities of old robber barons, or from new generations of oligarchs that profit from dubious monopolies and artificial financial bubbles. The wealth of the Schmidheiny family was made with asbestos-laden Eternit, a fact sometimes held against the Daros Collection. The collection and the Casa Daros project, however, is said to be the property of Ruth Schmidheiny and is financed with the divorce settlement reached with her former husband, Stephan Schmidheiny.
In the late 1960s the J. M. Kaplan Foundation channeled CIA funds to sponsor the formation of Central American leadership, the National Student Association (which was designed to counteract international leftist student movements), and anticommunist cultural associations like the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its Latin American publication, Mundo Nuevo. In the US, tax-exempt groups that gather and invest money to change government policies are categorized as “527 organizations.”
In 2001 the General Motors Foundation donated $10 million to the Smithsonian Institute to rename the latter’s hall of transportation “GM Hall,” raising fears that mass-transit systems would be underrepresented. Lawrence Small, the director of the Smithsonian, was later willing to give “CBS Corporation’s Showtime network what amounts to the right of first refusal on all documentaries dependent on Smithsonian archives or staff time” (Tyler Green, “Smithsonian exhibits our neglect,” Los Angeles Times, July 10, 2006 →). More recently, Shell sponsored the exhibition “Atmosphere” at the Science Museum in London and tried to influence the presentation on climate change. See →.
Deborah Sontag, “Clinton Award Included Cash To Foundation,” New York Times, May 30, 2015. The article is revealing of how the world of philanthropic foundations operates. It was prompted by Bill Clinton’s request for a donation of $500,000 to his foundation in exchange for his appearance at the Happy Hearts Fund gala event. The gala itself cost $363,413. The added Clinton honorarium exceeded the expected third in expenses.
At the time, the only way to get to Havana from Montevideo without being documented by the CIA was by flying to Prague and changing planes there.
During the beginning of the project, Hans-Michael Herzog, director of the collection, was very explicit about finding ways to become a cultural catalyst, activator, and enabler, rather than a provider.