Eliot Spitzer must have chuckled when he read Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. The newspaper that has spent the last few years decrying the excesses of the man it calls the Lord High Executioner of Wall Street has finally found a situation where it wishes Lord Spitzer had been more aggressive – in preventing the readers of New York City from benefiting from the New York Public Library’s decision to sell some works of art. The paintings sold by the library include Asher Durand’s “Kindred Spirits,” which went for $35 million. In the absence of an intervention by Mr. Spitzer, the newspaper that normally does such a wonderful job of advocating free markets goes so far as to call for legislators to step in to prevent free trade in art.

For the life of us we don’t see how Attorney General Spitzer or, for that matter, the notoriously corrupt and inefficient lawmakers in Albany would do a better job of running the New York Public Library than the volunteer trustees and professional leaders who have made that institution a national treasure. Three New York City officials already sit on the library board on an ex officio basis in addition to the volunteer trustees to represent the public interest. But the Journal article, a piece on the paper’s Leisure & Arts page by Lee Rosenbaum, takes aim at the volunteer trustees, whom it calls “the cream of New York’s social and moneyed elite” and who it claims have decided to “sell first, fund-raise later.”

Well, hold onto your library card just one second. For one thing, the library board is somewhat unusual in the city in that it includes not only the “moneyed elite” but a fair number of serious writers, academics, and scholars. But for another thing, it turns out that the library’s most recent annual report shows it raised about $28.9 million in fiscal 2003 and $39 million in fiscal 2004 in private contributions – nearly all of it before the painting was sold. By comparison, the public library in America’s second largest city, albeit Los Angeles, raised about $4.5 million in private funds last year. The New York library’s fundraising represents heroic volunteer labor and personal sacrifices by many trustees who know that to keep an institution of the New York Public’s quality and scale going, it takes fund-raising not just “later,” but before and during, too.

In running such a broadside against the library in the matter of “Kindred Spirits,” the Wall Street Journal finds itself in some odd company, including that of the New York Times, which has been wailing over this sale for months as if the buyer of the painting, one of the proprietors of Wal-Mart, were unworthy to own a fine painting. The Journal’s Kindred Spirits over at the New York Times, having been upstaged in their own fight by the Journal, promptly ran out a second library bashing piece by Ms. Rosenbaum yesterday, ignoring that it is the trustees of the library in whom is vested the responsibility and authority for setting the library’s priorities and allocating scarce resources. It’s entirely understandable, given the library’s primary mission, that they would have decided to sell the paintings to build the library’s research collections.

The library makes its resources available to the public free of charge. Unlike college libraries, it doesn’t charge tuition or raise money from alumni, and unlike art museums, it doesn’t charge admission to tourists. It’s been selling paintings throughout its history, paintings that were mostly acquired as gifts from its predecessor institutions. A former president of Harvard, Neil Rudenstine, now serves as a New York Public Library trustee and headed a two-year committee effort that culminated in the decision to sell the paintings. “We’re not a museum. We see the collection as being the book collection,” he told us yesterday. If the trustees have a responsibility of stewardship, they’ll be judged ultimately as stewards of the library. “From our point of view, our fundamental mission is the books, the library,” Mr. Rudenstine said.

If Asher Durand has more ardent admirers anywhere in the editorial rooms of New York than here at the Sun, we’d be surprised, and we’re glad to learn “Kindred Spirits” will be on display at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007. But one of the points that needs to be made about the sale of “Kindred Spirits” is that private owners are often the greatest conservators of great art. So there’s no reason to think that the movement of the painting to Alice Walton and the $35 million to the library will not be good for all. It is fully in accordance with the logic of public libraries, understood by Benjamin Franklin, who set up the first American lending library – that access to information is a pillar of democracy. The library’s trustees are well equipped to make decisions on how to use the library’s assets without meddling from the politicians or bureaucrats in Albany or their cheerleaders in the press corps.