Houston, we have a problem!

Apparently everything I've posted since July isn't showing up on the public view of the blog, though I still see it on my end.  WEIRD!  I'm not sure what I did to make this happen or when everything disappeared, but I'm on the case and hoping to make my missing musings on museums reappear shortly.

Selling Museum Collections to Save Cities - Intermission (continued)

I started to write this post several times, but always stopped, since the situation in Detroit is still developing in a way that the other examples we've looked at weren't.  Rather than jump the gun and write out a whole treatise which I then have to revise the next time the news is on, I think I'm going to let this one simmer for a little bit and come back to it in a couple of weeks when there's more information and less speculation.

In the meantime, here's some suggested reading:

• Howdy Doody's not for sale, according to NPR

• Bloomberg makes the case for moving Detroit's art to other museums

• Bloomberg's got it wrong, says the New Republic

• The New Yorker talks about tourist impact and trickle-down economics

I'll see you back here in a few weeks to recap these articles and whatever else comes up in the meantime. Same bat time, same bat place!

Selling Museum Collections to Save Cities - Intermission

Oooh, we're going to have to have to leave our discussion of de-accessioning and selling artifacts as a cliffhanger this week! 

Oh, come on.  This is the best possible picture to illustrate a paused
discussion of museum artifacts and you know it. 
(c) TriStar Pictures

 I wasn't able to get the post to a place I was happy with, and rather and slap together some half-baked arguments I think I'll ponder more over the weekend and get back to discussion later next week.

You can find Part I here and Part II here, and I'll see you here next week to wrap things up.

Selling Museum Collections to Save Cities Part II

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.

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.

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.

Scotch-Taping the Dead Sea Scrolls.

So last week I mentioned in passing the idea that older museums are, in some ways, a museum of museuming.  I thought it was something I'd discussed beyond a casual mention, but as I flip through the archives, it appears that it was in one of those posts that I only ever wrote in my head.  So unless you have access to Lucien's library you never read that.

I think this all ties back to the fact that my formative museum experiences both as a patron and an employee were at the Field Museum, which is an older institution with items that were prepped for the Chicago World's Fair still on display.  The Hall of Animals on the main level has been refreshed from time to time, but the bulk of the dioramas there are unchanged from the day the Field opened its doors in 1921.  There are a lot of older institutions like this - while some halls are renovated and updated, there are niches and corners and entire wings that remain largely the same as they were when the museum was conceived.

Photo CSGEO012695: Details of Ordovician brachiopod display from the Field Columbian Museum. The name of the fossil, its age, and the formation and location where it was collected were provided for each fossil, but little in the way of interpretation was provided for Museum visitors.  [Photo and caption cribbed directly from the Field Museum's website]

The thing is, a lot has changed in museuming (yes, it's a verb now.  "What do you do?" "Oh, I museum.").  Back in the day we stole native American remains and burned dodo skeletons to make room in collections and taped the Dead Sea Scrolls together with cellophane tape, because that was the best we could manage.  We sent expeditions to Africa to harvest their wildlife for our museum halls, and preserved their hides with arsenic, because that was the thing that was done.  Conservators and curators would (and do) blanch at these processes now, and many many staff hours spent are spent undoing old repairs and repatriating items that don't truly belong in museum collections.  But there's only so much that museums can do at any given time, which is why a visitor can find those untouched niches and halls with the out-of-date labels and dated mounting techniques.

And as much as I would love to see those halls updated in a way that would allow the beautiful artifacts there to speak to visitors more than they do now, I sort of love how they serve as a time capsule.  It's recursive: the exhibit in the museum showing, unintentionally, how exhibits in museums used to be made.  Older museums are, by default, a museum of museums.  They show what museums were, how they have changed, and point to what they can become.

Some people ignore those old halls and dated displays, and others wander through and imagine how great they could be if they were updated.  I've been guilty of both mindsets, but lately I've been making concerted effort to think about these older displays with a little more charity.  I try to imagine the excitement museum visitors in 1921 felt when they looked at that bear or that headdress, and I try to remember that one day, probably not as far away as I'd like, someone will look at the exhibits I am blown away by today and think, "Wow, I can't believe people ever thought this was a good exhibit."

For another, really nicely thought-out take on this general idea, check out this blog entry from the Field Museum's Fossil Invertebrates Division.  I stumbled across it while looking for pictures of some of the Field's early displays, and it's a great portrait of the evolution of museum displays.  And as proof that old doesn't always mean forgotten, I counted at least 5 specimens from the pre-WWII exhibits that are still on display at the Field Museum today.  That makes me pretty happy.

Adam Savage talks objects and stories and I love it.

I'm pausing briefly from my deeper ponderings re: artifacts and artifice to look at the issue from another angle.  And to be honest, life has kept me from reading The Same Ax, Twice, and I think I'll be able to continue my thoughts much more eloquently once I’ve got a little more grist for my mental mill.

So, in the course of mucking about on the internet recently I stumbled across this TED talk that Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame gave back in 2008.  (Yes, I am once again really late to the party.) I sort of love Mythbusters, and have always been taken with Adam’s outright enthusiasm for everything that he does.  He’s certainly skilled and intelligent, but I am most drawn to the way that he seems to be generally delighted with everything he learns and does.  (As he should be – the man gets to both do awesome in-depth period research and blow things up on the regular.)  I find him to be a very engaging speaker, largely because his enthusiasm is completely contagious.  This talk is a great example of it, and I encourage you to take 15 minutes and watch the whole thing.

Can’t watch the video?  The transcript is available on the TED site.

So this is different take on replicas, for sure – these are replicas for art’s sake, for personal pleasure, and the sense of accomplishment.  Adam’s attention to detail and commitment to his projects is both endearing and admirable.  But what I find even more compelling about this talk is the overarching theme: the stories that objects tell.  Go back and listen to the first section again, where he first talks about the dodo:  “I became obsessed with the object -- not just the beautiful photograph itself, and the color, the shallow depth of field, the detail that's visible, the wire you can see on the beak there that the conservator used to put this skeleton together -- there's an entire story here.”

That phrase clicked in my head as soon as I heard it, and was reinforced by everything else he said.  That, right there, is why museums are important, and why original objects are important.  I'm learning that there’s definitely a place for replicas in the museum world, but with the original object, you can see the story.  Not just the story of the dodo bird or the T.rex or the rare book, but of the many hands that preserved that object, the scientists and historians that studied it.  Each museum artifact actually tells two stories – the story of the artifact itself, and its inherent significance, and the story of the people who took that artifact, excavated it, preserved it, and put it on display.  Much like older museums are both museums that preserve the history of their collections and the history of museums as a thing in its own right, an artifact on display is many things at once.

Adam Savage is right: an object is many things to many people, but each one of those things is a story.  Adam’s dodo skeleton and Maltese Falcon are wonderful objects, and his efforts give them a story that is worth telling—but it’s not the story of the dodo or the Maltese Falcon, it’s the story of Adam Savage trying really hard to make something.  Those stories are important, in their own way, but I still believe that the original object captures stories in a way that no replica ever will.