I have recently outlined in Cognitive Dissonance Part 1 and Part 2 many ways that we can incorporate some existing tools into our loan contracts to either disincentivize works to travel or to transport them in more responsible ways.
I have also seeded the concept of the “Economic Eclipse” where economic needs, environmental sustainability, and collections care have fortuitously aligned. This means that we should look to exploit the moment for the sake of our collections.
To further brighten the halo around this eclipse, I want to propose ways that we can adjust our loan programs so that they sub-eclipse efficiency, cost, and accessibility to objects. I admit that I have not resolved all the issues with either idea, so please help me crowdsource possible solutions in the comments. This first idea I call the “decentralized model,” and it is one that, in some capacity, already exists.
In the decentralized exhibition model a group of works from a home institution leave to create another hub from which to loan over a long period of time.
Over the last year and a half, many of us have learned that, besides that re-imagined permanent collection show, we can reduce loan costs and, by default, emissions by lending and borrowing locally or regionally. Surely, many institutions have experimented with this during the pandemic to economically get a show installed amidst expensive and unavailable flights and travel restrictions. Of course, we cannot rely on this forever, but we can redefine local moving forward.
We typically loan in a “centralized” way: an object or group of objects leave the parent institution and then return. This pattern repeats unless the exhibition has multiple venues. It is very inefficient and costly in that object travel purely reacts to the loan request and logistics do not factor. Further, we do not distribute the costs between multiple venues. This results in potentially long round trips by the objects and their couriers, lots of miles logged, larger expenses tallied, and lots of carbon emitted. However, what if the objects originate and return to their pied-a-terre in the region?
By moving a group of objects to a new, long-term-yet-temporary home we create a new neighborhood in which to originate loans. This can work if we relocate objects to a region that demonstrates a demand for them or near institutions that might not request a loan due to the cost of shipping.
This concept can offer many benefits. An institution with off-site storage might decide to reduce or eliminate that cost by sending them on an extended tour or by relocating those objects to a less expensive area. By doing this, the collections become decentralized from the main institution, and from that area, you can promote and incentivize loans from the new location by asking for no loan fee withing a certain radius. This concept has the ability to create greater access to the collection by reducing the aforementioned costs and/or by making under-exhibited objects in the collection available.
The main problem with this concept that I have not fully resolved includes the cost of relocating the collection to the new home and the cost of storing it (if you did not already have it in off-site storage). That said, I will offer a couple of possible options. We can reduce the transportation costs by deflecting them back to a borrower as part of an exhibition. Another option is to offset them with the reduction of storage costs over the tenure of objects stay in the new, cheaper facility. I would love other ideas on how to make this viable. Think big.
To truly confront this problem, however, we need to think more holistically as an institution. We do this to activate part of the collection and/or to make it accessible by reducing the costs associated with loaning it. Thus, ideally, we could make that new hub a new exhibition location as well. What if the new hub is another museum in need of objects? What if you created a regional consortium of museums that exchange objects and facilitate each others’ loans? Base it around an exhibition, aggregated collections, or objects of a place or period?
In a way, museums already do this. We have all seen long-term loans of museum collections during large-scale capital improvements like a building renovation or the addition of a new wing. Clearly, in this way they ease the burden of paying for storage while they cannot access the building.
I have seen another variation of this in the form of a traveling exhibition going from, say, the United States to Europe. Capitalizing on the relocation of a large group of objects to a new continent, the collection of objects can be lent after the exhibition. In the case I have in mind (sorry, I cannot disclose who – but a major European museum), after the exhibition, the museum accepted a 5-year loan and periodically incorporated some of the items into its permanent collection exhibition while other loans to other European museums originated and returned to the hub museum (sublets?). As the formal relationship lasted for at least 5 years, the institutions shared the costs of the exhibition including transportation and the borrowing museum stored the objects for the duration of the loan. As this reduced the costs over time and fulfilled a part of the mission of the lending institution, they considered the expense justifiable. In this way, other institutions in Europe did not bear the often insurmountable cost of transatlantic shipping, objects already had crates, and the borrowing museum had additional objects to pull from for exhibition.
I can see larger institutions offering under-exhibited parts of its collections to smaller institutions or private collections offering to museums or kunsthalles without collections in a similar capacity. What happens when we view collections of objects as a series of long-term loans, we realize that we bear responsibility not simply to the objects in our own collections but also all the objects of the world as they arrive at our loading docks. Once we fully embrace that notion, we truly re-imagine our role in the grand scheme of collections care.
*I will not apologize for the pun in the title.
