Enter James N. Wood, a no-nonsense museum executive charged by the board of directors with refocusing the beleaguered organization on what it does best: collecting, preserving and educating the public on art. Wood is the former director of the Art Institute of Chicago and head of the St. Louis Art Museum. At the Getty Center, a majestic $1 billion facility perched in the Santa Monica Mountains above the Los Angeles Basin, Wood spoke to Worth features editor Douglas McWhirter about the Getty’s future, skyrocketing art prices and the hallmarks of a true collector.

(Photograph by Gary Moss.)

You now lead an organization recently at the center of a storm of negative press and scandal. How do you plan to move the Getty beyond this difficult period?

We must keep our eyes on the basics and develop a sense of trust. I already feel there is a great deal of that here. I really feel we turned a corner before I got here.

After the challenges of the last two years, what is the public’s greatest misperception about the Getty?

It is very hard for people to get an idea of what this institution does. They look at the size of the endowment and the money involved and they wonder where it all goes and what those in charge do. That’s understandable. But I think the public overlooks the actual work we carry out and the impact the Getty makes through conservation and research. This is not news, and probably never will be, but it is tremendously important. We need to articulate that better. Unfortunately, some of the things the Getty achieves will never become a household story.

Some of the Getty’s antiquities are the focus of a legal battle between the countries where the artists created the objects and the objects’ current owners. Where will the struggle between museums and the nations that want to control their cultural legacies end?

We have a total commitment to ethical standards of acquisition and ownership. That said, I feel strongly that great works of art are, to some degree, citizens of the world. People living in a country today may have little in common with the people and cultures that created art there hundreds and thousands of years earlier. I am very sympathetic to a nation wanting great representation of its own cultural heritage, but I’m also committed to making that heritage accessible to the world. You have to do it legally, and that’s complicated because the definition of legal has changed over time.

The Getty is in a unique position because we can ask, "Is money better spent trying to preserve a masterpiece that we cannot move, or should we spend money to buy one?" It’s not an either/or situation for us. We are committed to both sides of that equation.