I listen to NPR every day on my way to work, and heard two stories that really got me thinking about what it means to de-accession and sell items from a museum collection. It's topic I thought about a lot in 2008-2009 when the going got tough for the Field Museum, which we discussed yesterday. but yesterday we talked about a museum saving itself through de-accessioning and selling items. Today we're moving on to how a museum could help its community.
The story more of you might be familiar with is this piece from Morning Edition talking about the possibility of selling off the original Howdy Doody puppet to help pay for Detroit's debt. The second piece aired last week and discussed how the town of Harrisburg, PA was in the process of selling off a warehouse full of items originally intended to be the founding collection of museum that never opened.
The Harrisburg case is much more black-and-white to my mind, but there are a lot of facets. A previous mayor spent something like $8 million purchase artifacts with which to build a Wild West museum. On the East Coast. When the mayor was voted out of office all the artifacts were packed into a warehouse on the edge of town and just left there. With the city of Harrisburg facing some $300 million in debt, the new city leadership decided to auction off the items to pay off as much of that as they could. In the end, the auction raised somewhere between $2.5 and $4 million dollars (estimates seem to vary from source to source) which will cover about 0.7% of the city's debt.
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| photo (c) Paul Chaplin, Pennlive.com |
There are a few different angles from which to look at this, but let's start at the beginning: why the items were purchased in the first place. According to MSN, the former mayor wanted to open 5 museums in Harrisburg to draw tourists in: a firefighter's museum, a Civil War museum, an African American museum, the Wild West museum, and another that isn't mentioned. In theory, I support this. I think museums tend to be a good investment for a community, and have a longer legacy than shopping centers and residential development. BUT, and this is a big BUT, there needs to be a demonstrated audience for that museum before you start collecting objects. There also needs to be a plan for preservation, storage, and display. It doesn't sound like Harrisburg had any of those things. So when the administration in the city changed, the unused Wild West artifacts were stacked "in messy piles inside a public works building with a leaky ceiling and no climate control, where they sat for years" according to the NPR piece.
So in this case, there are artifacts that aren't being preserved, with no facilities or staff to care for them, basically not doing anyone any good. I have exactly zero problems with this collection being auctioned off. Since having the artifacts wasn't helping Harrisburg (and since it sounds like the original museum plan was a unilateral decision by the former mayor and not a citywide initiative), they might as well sell them and use the money to cover a small portion of the town's debt. To me this is like re-homing an abandoned pet - the old situation was so bad that pretty much any other option will be a better one.
Detroit's story is a totally different one: in that case, authorities are investigating the possibility of selling off the collections of an existing museum to cover the city's debts. And that, to me is a totally different situation. Instead of "rescuing" unseen items from a damp warehouse you're talking about taking art that had been publicly accessible and selling it into private collections. To my mind, that act would culturally impoverish a city that's already seen its share of losses. But...would it be better to have Howdy Doody on display, or police that can get to your house less than 58 minutes after you call 911? That context can certainly diminish the importance of an art collection, and we'll discuss how to balance those differing priorities tomorrow.
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