A constellation of enterprising ideas about art and artifact collections.
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.
Unquestionably yes! Whether the Benin objects or the Parthenon Marbles (we do not call them “Elgin” after their plunderer anymore). Almost weekly we see more information about the repatriation of objects.
As an independent collections manager/registrar, I have this fantasy/nightmare about meeting with a new private collector client, and with the ink still wet on the NDA, I greet a famously stolen object, like the Vermeer from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, in the parlor of their Upper East Side townhouse in New York when I visit their collection for the first time. A decision confronts me: report the work and face a lawsuit for breaking my confidentiality and confidence with my client and who knows what else, versus remaining silent and, consequently, excusing the actions that led to the acquisition of the object.
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.
