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Originally Posted by team zissou
she was just mentioning that she or he was from Buffalo as a point of reference.
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He -- I've met him.
And it's not just a point of reference; it was a basis for comparison; go back and read his post again.
However, he was more concerned with addressing the same subject you are below:
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The main point of the post was that the barnes in merion is the ANTIthesis of what mr barnes desired through his will. well, the pro-merion supporters are quick to point out that mr barnes was against the philadelphia establishment when he established his collection in merion and made sure at the time that priority access was granted to working class people. if that is what we are trying to protect; than what is the benefit of keeping the art collection on latches lane besides the fact that 50 plus years ago (at the advent of the suburb community and pre-white flight) merion seemed like the best place to achieve this goal and the facts cannot support achieving this goal more in merion than in Philly?
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Whether or not you are aware of this, you've brought out another reason this subject is more complex than the ordinary dispute.
It is true that Barnes had a major beef with Philadelphia high society, especially after it dissed his art collection when he unveiled it in the gallery he built for it. It is therefore quite possible, given what we know about Dr. Barnes' own eccentricity, that his stated desire to reserve the art for the working people, like his decision to have control of the Barnes board pass to the Lincoln University trustees upon de Mazia's death, is as much motivated by his desire to poke his fingers in the eyes of the Proper Philadelphians he lived among as it is any altruistic sentiment.
Even in the 1920s, when he built the gallery on the grounds of his estate in Lower Merion, Philadelphia's working people really didn't have access to the site of his art collection. It is not that far from Merion station on the Main Line, true, but working folks rode the trolleys then, and the trolleys didn't pass quite as close to the site. So if your argument is that the Lower Merion site works against Barnes' stated desire to expose working people to his collection and theories, then your argument is as applicable when Barnes built his gallery as it is now.
Now to the flip side of this: Given that Barnes harbored such deep resentment of the way the local elite treated him, he would probably not be happy at all with the way the Barnes relocation has come about, for it came about by way of an Establishment coup against the Lincoln-appointed Barnes trustees. But those trustees cannot be considered completely blameless, for they appointed the executive director who pretty much drained the Barnes' meager endowment with his lawsuit against those same Lower Merion neighbors who are now up in arms over the move.
Peel away one layer and another emerges.