Hunt, though, is determined that by setting an example through attacking staff and bureaucracy surplus in his own department he will be able to persuade arts groups, museums and galleries to focus on their administrative cost base rather than frontline services.
LONDON — Auction houses have a tough job persuading art buyers and sellers that the market has never been stronger when their worldwide sales are down from the previous year.
And having persuaded art collectors to part with thousands (and occasionally millions) of dollars for spectacularly designed furniture, the auction house Phillips de Pury now plans to do the same for graphic design by introducing graphics to its design sales next year, with posters among the lots.
It did to Joseph Duveen, the art dealer, whose efforts in the 1930s to persuade the art historian Bernard Berenson to change the attribution from one to the other are the subject of Simon Gray's play "The Old Masters," which recently ended a run at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven.
His goal was to persuade an art house, such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Film Forum or the Angelika, to open a satellite in the suburbs.
He said the only way to persuade these "art-history majors" to join the fiercely competitive economic mechanism is to tempt them with extraordinary payoffs.
His job is to persuade the art-loving General Gong Fei (Thom Sesma) to donate a rare jade bust to the British Museum.
Not everyone in Qatar is persuaded of art's importance.
A third way to live the artist's life comes in the form of Dirk Stroeve, the painter who grasps the greatness of Strickland's work, and persuades the art dealer to carry it, while accepting his own mediocrity.
Her lover wants to go to the Louvre; paintings bore Nana, but he attempts to persuade her, saying "art and beauty are life".
