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Deaccessioning Art
| Article
# : |
18222 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1990 |
3,068 Words |
| Author
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David D''Arcy
David D'Arcy broadcasts on cultural matters on National Public
Radio. |
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
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