Museums bought extra artwork throughout pandemic; why return?

By Virginia Postrel
The coronavirus has been tough on museums. An October survey for the American Alliance of Museums discovered that two-thirds had reduce on public packages, greater than half had laid off or furloughed workers and almost a 3rd have been nonetheless closed to the general public.
Those that have been open had spent a mean of $27,000 on virus precautions and had solely about 35% their regular attendance. On common, the museums anticipated to lose 35% of their budgeted earnings in 2020 and 28% of regular working earnings this 12 months. Twelve % stated that they had a “significant risk” of closing completely by this fall.
That’s made artwork museums rethink the ethics of promoting elements of their collections. Controversially, the Association of Art Museum Directors has established a short lived protected harbor from censure or sanction for member museums that “deaccession” artworks “to support the direct care of the museum’s collection.”
In October, the Brooklyn Museum of Art bought 10 items, together with a portray by Lucas Cranach the Elder, for $6.6 million at Christie’s and a bigger group of works at Sotheby’s for $19.9 million. The cash, together with that from future gross sales, will go to construct a $40 million endowment supporting care of the gathering. In the identical Sotheby’s sale, the Palm Springs Art Museum, which has been closed for a 12 months, bought a Helen Frankenthaler portray for $4.7 million.

Under regular circumstances, the affiliation prohibits museums that promote artwork from utilizing the income for operations or capital enhancements. Proceeds can solely go for purchasing extra artwork. Museums that break the rule might be barred from borrowing artwork from different museums for displays, amongst different punishments. The moratorium on sanctions lasts by means of April 10, 2022.
But why not make the emergency measure everlasting? Why not broaden it to allow different makes use of of gross sales proceeds? The moratorium opens a small crack in a cartel that retains massive numbers of artworks out of sight, hampers the pliability of long-standing establishments to develop new methods, and limits the provision of artwork to upstarts.
Most massive museums show solely 5% of their collections at a time. “As a rule of thumb, consider the least distinguished object in a gallery, and you can be sure that there are one or two just a teeny bit inferior, and a dozen nearly as good, in a warehouse or the basement,” wrote Michael O’Hare, a public coverage professor at University of California at Berkeley, in a 2015 article calling for artwork museums to do extra to foster public engagement with artwork.
There is, after all, the hazard that museums will promote timeless treasures to chase passing fads or overpay their executives. But because the profitable backlash in opposition to the Baltimore Art Museum’s plans to promote some modernist masterworks demonstrates, individuals who care a couple of museum’s assortment have methods of exercising their affect. Museum boards {and professional} workers deserve the pliability to make the trade-offs applicable to their establishment’s circumstances, with or with no pandemic.