Two days ago, I asked Crystal Bridges Museum for an explanation as to why it hadn’t announced its recent highly important new acquisitions, which it purchased at public auction. Late this afternoon, the answer arrived in the form of an emailed link to a new post on the museum’s blog—Announcing New Acquisitions: Process & Recent Highlights, written by Diane Carroll, its director of communications:
“I’ve chosen to post this information on our blog,” she wrote me, “in the interest of allowing comments and broader perspectives.” (That’s an invitation, art-lings: Share your views.)
Here’s the key passage from Crystal Bridges’ blog post describing the museum’s rationale for keeping mum about such stellar additions as the Georgia O’Keeffe and Jasper Johns, auctioned three months ago at Sotheby’s:
With each acquisition, thoughtful stewardship involves assessing all the relevant factors surrounding the purchase and progressing with the process with curatorial and exhibition teams of developing an interpretive plan and a debut schedule.
Crystal Bridges typically announces acquisitions based on the timing of installations, exhibitions, and with consideration to historical relevance and interpretive information about how the work fits within the context of our permanent collection—an accepted museum practice supported by collection management resources, including Marie C. Malaro’s A Legal Primer on Managing Museum Collections, a resource cited by the American Alliance of Museums.
I knew and interviewed attorney Marie Malaro, the former director of George Washington University’s Museum Studies Program, who once sent me her 1994 “Museum Governance,” autographing it, “With Admiration”:
Also on my art-law bookshelf is a vintage copy of Malaro’s 1985 collections-management bible (in the brown-colored cover)—the one that Crystal Bridges cited in its blog post:
So let’s dust it off, crack it open and see what Marie actually said:
Experience demonstrates that it is preferable to favor openness with regard to collection records. When viewed objectively, most of what is in these records should be available to the public. Normally, how a museum acquires and disposes of objects is a proper public concern….A policy of secrecy only breeds distrust and may produce an atmosphere where the public is intolerant of even legitimate reasons for withholding information.
A more prudent approach is to treat information in collection records as open to the public unless there is a clearly defensible reason, consonant with applicable statutes, for denying a specific request [emphasis added].
As I’ve said before, the guiding principle for museums’ holdings is transparency. If there is a “defensible reason” for Crystal Bridges’ withholding information about its recent major acquisitions, we’ve yet to hear it. And as far as I can see, Malaro’s legal primer doesn’t “support” the museum’s non-disclosure as “accepted museum practice” (as claimed by Crystal Bridges in its blog post). On the contrary, it advocates “openness.”
All of those things that Crystal Bridges says it wants to do, such as “developing an interpretive plan and a debut schedule,” can happen in due course. But public identification of important new acquisitions should happen now.
What’s wrong with having a gallery debut to look forward to?