As Nicholas O’Donnell points out, it can easily seem, when you start looking at deaccessioning, that there’s something of a double standard at play. To take a very germane example: While the Berkshire Museum finds itself in the midst of a national firestorm, the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, is a rich and highly-respected institution with no deaccessioning controversy whatsoever. And yet while the Berkshire Museum is selling off 40 works, MoMA is selling off 400!

Such deaccessions are going to be necessary at any institution with both a curatorial vision and a steady stream of donations. The donations will never match up perfectly with the vision: there will be works you want and don’t have, and there will also be works you have which you don’t particularly want.

Deaccessioning, when it’s done well, turns the irrelevant into the relevant: you’re basically swapping extraneous pieces for art which is going to be central to your program.

That said, O’Donnell has a good point: the pieces being sold by MoMA are leaving the public sphere, in a way that surely was not intended by the original donors. While the deal being done (wanted art for unwanted art) is a good one for MoMA, it’s not a good one when it comes to people who want to see the art being sold. Which is why I’ve long been a supporter of the Ellis Rule, which states that the museum selling the works must “ensure that the institution or individual to whom you sell commits in some binding form to equal or higher conservational standards and equal or higher public access”.

Read the full article by Felix Salmon at Cause and Effect