Selling museum collections to save cities - Part I

I heard two interesting news pieces on selling museum collections this week that have gotten me thinking about de-accessioning and a museum's responsibility to its community again.  And after writing this all out, I think it's clear that it needs a multi-day discussion and not just a giant brain dump, so we're starting with some background and getting on to Detroit and Harrisburg tomorrow.

So.  Selling museum objects: yes, or no?

It's a topic that I spent a lot of time thinking about and discussing (at length, and frequently over drinks) with my colleagues back when I worked at the Field Museum in Chicago.  I left in 2011, before the most recent restructuring, but I was there throughout 2008 and 2009, when we went through some tight times and lost a lot of staff to attrition, early retirement, and layoffs.  It was a tough time for everyone at the Field, and one topic that came up frequently - sometimes jokingly and sometimes deadly serious - was the sale of artifacts to save jobs.  Why keep a statue in storage unseen by the public, but fire the people who care for those collections?  Are the objects more important than the staff who cares for them?  (No seriously.  Think about that question, because it's at the heart of all of this.)  We joked about a giant yard sale on the lakefront and wondered about how many jobs such a sale might save, even as we argued about the ethics of ever selling anything out of a collection at all.

The Field sold several major paintings in 2004, declaring that the works weren't central to the museum's mission and that the money from the sale would go towards collections care and new objects.  There was a huge controversy, which may be why the Field has been very wary of discussing such a sale again.  A recent article by the Chicago Tribune claims that the Museum was investigating the sale of collections as far back as 2010, but they never breathed a word of that to the staff.  The article discusses one of the major difficulties of selling collection items: what to do with the money.  Many people feel that if you're selling an object you should purchase other objects.  Staffing is transitory and non-tangible, and I'm sure it's hard for a Board to say, "We're selling this painting so we can pay for our curators."  I would hope that they also consider that firing the curators (and preparators and registrars and housekeeping staff and security and ticketing staff and scientists etc...) to keep the artifacts is a similar problem.  It's like The Gift of the Magi, but with museums instead of hair and watches.

So it's a difficult choice.  Do you preserve the collections for future generations and hope that they won't be too damaged by the inadequate staffing, or do you sell items to maintain a staff that can preserve the items that remain?  Is a museum's duty to its objects and future, or its staff and the present?   I love a compromise, so I'd try to choose the middle ground - sell a few items that are no longer central to the institution's mission and use that money to maintain the remaining collection, but that's not a perfect solution either, as the Field Museum learned in 2004.

And what happens to this argument when you're not selling objects to benefit the institution, but to benefit the larger community? That discussion starts tomorrow.