NY Times art critic and reporter Grace Glueck is seething at Tyler Green, the blogger who questioned whether Glueck should be allowed to be a trustee at the Clark Art Institute (see her review today of Anselm Kiefer at the Aldrich), when such a dual role directly violates the newspaper’s written ethics policy. Glueck has resigned her position as trustee, and according to a report in the North Adams Transcript yesterday (sorry, I’ve been off with visiting in-laws), her resignation reads:

“One example of the many inaccuracies and distortions in the blogger’s screed is his inference that I had influence in The Times’ coverage of the Clark over the years. This is an insult to the Clark and to my colleagues at The Times. Certainly the high quality of the Clark’s collection, its exhibitions and its acquisitions, its scholarship program, its long-range building projects, and its growing international fame were enough to attract the attention of my savvy colleagues without advocacy by me. And in point of fact, I never acted as an advocate.”

(That comment right there sure sounds like advocacy to me, but no matter …)

A woman working in PR for the museum tells the Transcript that this incident brings out the “good and bad” of blogging, and Glueck says that her “reason (for resigning) is that a blogger has cited as a conflict of interest, my working for The Times while serving as a Clark trustee, and as inaccurate as are his insinuations, it seems better for The Times and the Clark that I leave the Clark board.”

In other words, Glueck is resigning because of Tyler Green, not because of any wrongdoing.

What of her violation of the ethics policy, when policies like these are put in place to protect the very foundations of independent reporting, which CultureGrrrl blogger Lee Rosenbaum praises Glueck for in an odd Glueck defense this morning? (Rosenbaum tortures her own argument so much as to say that Glueck’s dual positions did pose a conflict, but not one as serious as when the Times’ former publisher sat on the Metropolitan Museum’s board.)

The fact is, it only adds insult to injury to commit an offense, and then sling mud as you grudgingly rectify it. If Glueck really feels that her dual positions presented no ethical quandary, then she shouldn’t be fighting with Tyler Green. She should be fighting with the upper management at the Times, crusading for a change in the newspaper’s policies, or at least publicly arguing for one. Until she presents a substantive defense of her perspective on the issue, I can’t help but see her, at least in part, as disingenuous.