A constellation of enterprising ideas about art and artifact collections.
This perfectly exemplifies the “preparation paradox” wherein through careful and thorough preparation one prevents a problem and, consequently, creates the sense that the intense preparation was actually an overreaction. This phenomenon readily reflects the risk mitigation efforts of professionals who steward the world’s cultural heritage.
Our databases that contain the vast troves of knowledge about the cultural heritage we steward analog the difference between web2 and web3. When we catalog an object and upload our knowledge of an object to a database, we mostly aggregate and copy information (literally, ad nauseum for me this week) that already exists about an object and store it with one, centralized company. Thus, that company gains a certain amount of power over our data based on its size.
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.
If we acknowledge that it is safer for an object to remain at its institution, then why do we loan it to other institutions? If we acknowledge that it is more environmentally sustainable for an object to remain at its institution, then why do we loan it to other institutions? If we acknowledge that it is cheaper not to borrow objects for exhibitions, then why do we borrow it at great expense?
The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed widespread suffering on people, labor, and budgets around the world for well over a year now. Amidst all the friction between seemingly binary choices, it has also sparked some creative fires in our art and artifact wilderness that appear to acknowledge that this extraordinary moment aligns economic incentives with sustainability practices like a summer solstice on a clear day at Stonehenge.
