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.