Deaccessioning Via Private Sales and Auctioning

Last Thursday's Wall Street Journal contains another concise and lucid argument by Daniel Grant on deaccessioning. This time Grant delineates the pros and cons of private and public art sales by museums without the usual hysteria that accompanies the debate over deaccessioning.

In fact, Grant gives wonderful examples of situations where a museum may want to sell all of its collection to one private buyer (read Orange County Museum of Art), and others where the museum may be well advised to sell by fragmentation (read the Albright-Knox Art Gallery).

However, it is in the last two paragraphs were Grant finally takes a stand and proclaims that "[r]aising money and doing well by the art aren't mutually exclusive goals," and concluding that museum directors should do what's best for their institution by stating forcefully that "this is what I am going to do, this is what I am doing, and this is what I did."

Deaccessioning Via Private Sales and Auctioning