Max Anderson (above), director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), is the rare art museum director who is willing to speak out forcefully against misguided practices of professional colleagues. His outspokenness in defense of core principles endears him to me and other journalists, but perhaps not to some fellow museum directors.
His latest salvo appeared Monday on the Art
21 Blog—strong, forcefully expressed views on museum deaccessioning, which he believes is too often practiced “not in service of preserving and protecting collections, but in service
of monetizing them.” He starts off describing what he says may have been (in 1775) “the first documented ‘deaccessioning'”—remains from a dodo bird, now extinct, then held by the Oxford University
Museum of Natural History. (Fortunately for science, some of the remains were retained.)
He goes on to outline some modern-day “dodo deaccessioning” (my term, not his), taking issue with what he calls the “inadvisable motives” behind them
Specifically, he decries a practice commonly employed and openly embraced by other institutions—“selling one or more
fine objects to acquire a work that is considered to be a yet finer
work by another artist–or trading up [his emphasis], not from a
lesser work, but from one avowedly fine work or works to acquire
another.” Such decisions, he says, are based “on the conviction that today’s taste and preference trumps
yesterday’s.”
On this, Anderson has a view that I share:
It is IMA’s opinion that
“trading up” runs the very real risk of being proven wrong by our
successors and, if carried to an extreme, would lead to an indefensible
use of the permanent collection as an impermanent resource to satisfy
the shifting tastes of curators and directors from one generation to
the next.
He then alludes to his institution’s online deaccession database, which CultureGrrl heaped praise on a year ago, when it was newly launched. At that time, he had offered to share the technology behind that database with any other interested institutions. It appears, from his “Art 21” comments, that no one has taken him up on this:
To date, I know of no other art museum planning to present a complete, illustrated, and searchable database of the works on their way out the door. I would hope that as a field we could agree that this is a collective obligation before lawmakers [my link, not his] decide that it is and
arrive at approaches that are at odds with our non-profit, educational mandate.
And in other Max news, I look forward to the planned posting on the IMA’s ArtBabble video website, a few weeks hence, of his public conversation today at the IMA with Rusty Powell, director of the National Gallery, Washington. They’ll be discussing “issues facing art museums internationally,
from ownership claims to exhibition exchanges to global partnerships.” No live webcast, alas.