The Deaccessioning Blog is a project begun by Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento to both analyze and archive the increasing institutional deaccessioning of modern and contemporary art.
"It is the people at the top who deserve the most opprobrium."
New rules were approved on May 17, 2011, and went into effect on June 8, 2011. The rules are meant to provide museums with the discretion to refine their collections over time, while at the same time ensuring that museums’ collections are preserved for the public.
The new rules continue to make clear that proceeds from deaccessioning may never be used to pay operating expenses, and may only be used for “the acquisition of collections, or the preservation, conservation or direct care of collections.” However, the rules expand the circumstances in which deaccession can take place:
1. the item is inconsistent with the mission of the institution as set forth in its mission statement;
2. the item has failed to retain its identity;
3. the item is redundant;
4. the item’s preservation and conservation needs are beyond the capacity of the institution to provide;
5. the item is deaccessioned to accomplish refinement of collections;
6. it has been established that the item is inauthentic;
7. the institution is repatriating the item or returning the item to its rightful owner;
8. the institution is returning the item to the donor, or the donor’s heirs or assigns, to fulfill donor restrictions relating to the item which the institution is no longer able to meet;
9. the item presents a hazard to people or other collection items; and/or
10. the item has been lost or stolen and has not been recovered.
In another significant change, the new rules require that each institution shall include in its annual report to the State Education Commissioner a list of all deaccessions in the prior year.
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1 comment:
Sadly, Ben Davis follows the lead of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ "A Portrait of the Visual Arts," in not counting the value of the artwork itself in finding that in 2000 the largest 20 percent of all art museums controlled 98 percent of the assets in the nonprofit visual arts sector. If you ignore the value of the artwork itself, you don't realize that many art museums of all sizes are stunningly wealthy institutions.
If you do focus on the total wealth these institutions control, "the art bureaucrats at the top, those pious guardians of our nonprofit castles of culture ...deserve our scorn right now..." all the more for letting "the personnel who do the unglamorous day-to-day stuff that makes these places run" get "hardest hit" and for first cutting "variable costs, which are the programming costs." Deaccession doesn't let a museum have its Monet and money, too, even when it needs the money quite as badly as those museums Davis points out. So, the museum profession desperately needs to pursue innovations that mobilize the collection's financial value without jeopardizing, as deaccessioning does, its cultural value. The time for leaders is right now.
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