A constellation of enterprising ideas about art and artifact collections.
We’re all in the cultural sector and the things museums remind me is that most things don’t survive. We see different civilizations and all the things they’ve left behind that don’t exist anymore. We should remember that we, too, are heading in this direction where our civilization as we know it will cease to exist. This is just what happens. I think that when things close, they make space for new things.
Those of us who spend time with collections (not just in museums) know that several pieces will never wake from hibernation. While candidates for deaccessioning, removing objects could create a major image problem and also requires a large amount of work for staff. Safely storing and housing these objects similarly requires massive amounts of resources and represents a safety risk as illustrated by the British Museum.
Last year, I predicted various events and outcomes based on my own experiences and conversations and readings. Those predictions, as they tend to do, varied wildly in their outcome.
We all understand that predictions and “best of” lists and ratings exist for conversation and debate. This year, however, I want artificial intelligence to create the debate.
Collection storage grabs the recent headlines as the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen opens the Boijmans Depot in the Netherlands and thus creates a new, publicly-accessible facility while closing its main building in Rotterdam for renovation. In addition, this complaint-disguised-as-an-article in Hyperallergic naively suggests we should have less storage for our institutions and fails to offer a plan for what to do with un-exhibited collections. So, I will offer some ideas. The implication of which suggests a great cascade of object redistribution may have begun.
As a lot of “froth” has accumulated around the NFT trend, that they provide scarcity will undoubtedly allow them to weather the fad in the world of collections. Scarcity is the beating heart of the collection, of the museum, of the collectible. We may all have an image of the Mona Lisa, but only the Louvre has the actual work. It epitomizes scarcity despite the flood of reproductions.
