The fine art of documentation

The Honolulu Museum of Art filed a lawsuit to recoup $890,000 in payments made to a San Francisco art collector for five pieces of Southeast Asian art that have no written warranty of authenticity and indemnification.

Formerly the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the museum in 2004 agreed to pay Joel Alexander Greene $80,000 per year for the rest of his life for the five pieces valued at $1.275 million. Museum donors might be wondering why those documents weren’t required before the first payment was made.

Museum director Stephen Jost said he has been unable to reach Greene, who so far has refused to prove the sculptures were legally exported from their country of origin and imported into the United States. Our guess is Greene will be difficult to find, much like the documentation he promised.

Shelters are good somewhere else

The public seems to embrace the idea of providing more temporary shelters for the homeless, with 81 percent of those responding to the Hawaii Poll supporting the use of Sand Island and other sites for this purpose. When the site of that shelter was placed in their own neighborhood, that support dropped to 62 percent, but that’s still a sizable majority.

Of course, displays of “not in my back yard” sentiment in recent years suggests further winnowing of support when plans move from the theoretical to the actual. Then there’s also the prospect of persuading the homeless themselves, many of whom turn down existing vacancies, that a shelter beats the streets.