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The Great Migration?

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The Great Migration?

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.

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IRL NFTs FTW

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IRL NFTs FTW

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.

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The Storytellers

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The Storytellers

I have a more likely theory (maybe I should actually ask a curator why): they get recruited to those positions because they are good storytellers. They craft and relate narratives around institutions, around objects, around exhibitions that inspire curiosity and devotion among donors and earn loyalty from those around them.

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We've Been Discovered

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We've Been Discovered

Not to lose out to NFTs, two recent headline-grabbing events will push those of us who work with art and artifacts to refine our relationship to technology: the valuation of Masterworks at $1 billion and the use of artificial intelligence by Swiss company Art Recognition in the authentication process of a Peter Paul Reubens painting at the National Gallery in London.

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Savings and [Distributed] Loans

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Savings and [Distributed] Loans

The speculative concept involves only shipping objects one-way and thus cutting transportation in half. In other words, you leave your objects wherever you loan them and store the objects in the nearest storage facility that meets your standards. You dispense with the idea that they return to a “home” institution immediately.

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Cognitive Dissonance and Traveling Collections, Part 2

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Cognitive Dissonance and Traveling Collections, Part 2

To try to provoke thought and initiate change, I devised some options that try to disincentivize loans – or, conversely, incentivize not shipping – in order to preserve objects as well as to reduce the large carbon footprints that they exude.

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