This story is very important at a national level. If the Berkshire Museum gets away with its current plan, then it will effectively end up creating a playbook for all other American nonprofits looking to get rich quick. Most would never dream of acting this way, but the dreadful precedent that the Berkshire Museum is setting will redound for decades to come.

There is no conceivable justification for the museum sending all its most precious art to Sotheby’s before announcing that it was facing fiscal problems and might need to deaccession some works.

Donors will never again be able to sure that their wishes will be honored, not after seeing the way in which Norman Rockwell’s clear desire, that his paintings remain in the Berkshires for the benefit of the county as a whole, has been utterly ignored by the museum’s board.

I can’t emphasize enough that this is a uniquely terrible deaccession plan, which effectively sells off all of the museum’s most valuable objects: no other museum that I know of has ever behaved in anywhere near as drastic a manner. On top of that, I can’t think of any other museum which has treated its local community with the utter contempt being displayed by Shields and his cronies.

Read the full article by Felix Salmon at Cause and Effect