In these days of blockbuster shows and exhibitions that travel for years, it's not uncommon to arrive at a museum in the hope of seeing a particular picture from that institution's permanent collection, only to learn that the work is on loan and won't be back for at least a year. That's frustrating enough, but a new prospect facing visitors is even more troubling. Now one may legitimately fear that a picture in a museum won't be displayed, and may never be, since the museum has sold that work and others, most likely to private collectors, in order to buy something else that's considered more valuable or desirable.
These fears were confirmed last May when the Guggenheim Museum in New York sold off paintings by Kandinsky, Chagall, and Modigliani to finance a multimillion-dollar purchase of American Minimalist works from the 1960s and 1970s. As art prices rise far beyond the budgets of most museums, institutions are finding that the only way they can amass the cash needed to acquire major works of art is to sell some of what they already own. As those works pass, seemingly irreversibly, into private hands, many in the art world say this practice has already gone too far.
Removal and Sale
The practice is called deaccessioning - the removal and sale of works of art from a museum's collection to enable that museum to purchase other works. Museums in this country have been doing it routinely for decades, to upgrade their collections, they argue, and in the process to avoid expensive storage and preservation costs for works they rarely show. Steven Weil, deputy director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., says his museum has pursued an aggressive deaccessioning policy for the last five years in order to reshape what was essentially a private collection, strong in some areas and weak in others. With an annual acquisitions budget from Congress of only $150,000, Weil says that the Hirshhorn would have to wait ten to twenty years to buy a major painting at today's prices if the museum didn't have a deaccessioning program. That program, he says, is intended to turn the Hirshhorn into a public collection with overall strength.
"It's simply part of managing a living collection for a purpose and not seeing it as an agglomeration of everything that ever came through the front door," says Weil. "A museum is not a depository, it's not an archive. It's a place that uses its collection for educational purposes. From time to time, we have to adjust and change that."
Many museums, especially the larger ones, have accumulated unenviable gifts or whole collections for the sake of one or two good things in those collections, and every item has to be stored and insured - a huge expense. "It makes no sense at all to condemn these museums for not maintaining a lot of material that is educationally and aesthetically not important," says Sherman Lee, director of the Cleveland Museum from 1958 to 1983.
Now, however, in an art market where prices are often in the eight-figure range, it takes more than the disposal of aesthetically unimportant works to enable a museum to expand its collections and acquire works of importance. Museums are now selling valuable works, they say, in order to buy anything of value.
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