When the Heritage Foundation suggested that the Air Force reconsider a couple of unnecessary McDonnell Douglas aircraft programs, the mega-defense contractor withdrew its grant to the rightwing think tank faster than you can say "stealth bomber." Corporations, of course, always toe their own bottom lines - and you'd think that the art world would know this. But the sliest PR coup lately enacted by corporate America has been the transformation of the supposedly leftish, nonprofit art world into the single most visible corporate image-booster operating today.

Consider the case of Philip Morris, recently exposed for its big-bucks support of Jesse Helms and his museum. Several art mavens report that the folks at Philip Morris are furious that they've been singled out for "abuse": PM staffers claim that R.J. Reynolds contributes more than PM to the wacko North Carolina senator's causes. (PM spokeswoman Posie Di Sesa would not comment.) The main difference between the tobacco-mongers is that PM funds the arts and has effectively established an illusion of liberalism and good-neighborliness through that support. But according to leaflets distributed at ACT UP's April 26 anti-Helms/anti-PM demonstration, PM's tobacco products were responsible for 135,729 deaths in 1988 in the U.S. alone. (Ironically, that demo was held on the sidewalk in front of PM's Midtown headquarters, where the McWhitney's lobby branch is showing the homoerotic paintings of the 1940s and '50s' "Fire Island School" - Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and George Tooker.)

So, in recognition of the egregious corporate bull-slinging inspired by Earth Day, as well as Philip Morris's value-free funding of everything and everyone from homophobe Jesse Helms to the AIDS-exhibition-presenter Artists Space, I single out a few recent contributions to the "corporatization" of the art world. The van Boesky Award winners include:

For replacing incomprehensible Artforumese with pretentious CEO patter, a van Boesky Award to Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum director Thomas Krens (who actually talks this way, pity his staff): "Revenue streams are by and large flattening...if we develop the collection, programs, and staff, we can get a better share of the audience by offering a more sophisticated product...I have one big objective: to reverse the escalation of costs and make this institution successful." (From an interview in The New York Times, March 5, 1990.)

For celebrating Third World history (while despoiling its present and mortgaging its future), a van Boesky Award to Pennzoil and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. "Pennzoil Company has contributed $150,000 to sponsor a major exhibition of Indonesian sculpture...Pennzoil currently has several ongoing projects in Indonesia, including gold and silver mining ventures in Kalimantan plus oil and gas interests." (From a museum press release of September 19, 1989.)

For boldly moving beyond mere corporate financing to corporate curating, a van Boesky Award to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Mitsui Fudosan (a subsidiary of Japan's leading real estate developer, which owns the Exxon Building in Rockefeller Center and other major American properties): "The SFMMA and Mitsui Fudosan have announced a unique five-year partnership...[through which] Mitsui will introduce SFMMA curator of architecture and design Paolo Polledri to a network of contacts within Japan's architecture and design areas." (From a museum press release of January 25, 1989.)

Busy Tom Krens surely deserves the first van Boesky for Lifetime Achievement (now that pioneering corporatizer and curmudgeonly magazine editor Tom Hoving is out of the picture). The Guggenheim director is also chairman of the MASS MoCA Cultural Development Commission - a body designed to oversee the creation of "the world's largest museum of contemporary art" and peopled with Krens cronies such as Spanish Guggenheim curator Carmen Gimenez. With the Guggenheim Foundation funding of the first exhibition of the unlikely-to-be-completed MASS MoCA last year, Krens created the appearance (at least) of art-world conflict of interest.

Like any industrialist contemplating the post-1992, Pan-European market, Krens has major expansion plans. They call for a multinational chain of Guggenheim-sized museums that can rotate exhibitions. (Feasibility studies are proceeding on a Salzburg McGuggenheim and a new Venice McGuggenheim, along with persistent rumors about branches in Tokyo and Spain, which Krens has denied. Don't count out Prague.) Krens's conceptual model here is not merely the burger-and-fries assembly line, but Hollywood film distribution.

And this is precisely the meaning of the corporatization of art: The application of corporate values and practices to nonprofit art institutions. It was corporate models of institutional behavior and outlook that ensured that the recent, naked power struggle between former Whitney director Tom Armstrong and factions of his board of nouveau riche, CEO-collectors was treated like a proxy fight by major stockholders, rather than a decision with ramifications for New York's 100,000 artists and infinitely larger art audience. (An art-dealer friend of mine quaintly charges that the problem is the demise of noblesse oblige - and she's partly right.)