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.

What's the main goal of a museum?

This seems like a simple enough question, but it has hidden layers.  For some museums (Banana Club Museum, I'm lookin' at you...) the aim is simple: collect items around a central theme and display them.  They are not on the cutting edge of banana research, they are not preserving important banana artifacts that would otherwise be destroyed, they're not making the public aware of the long cultural traditions of the banana.  They're just collecting banana stuff, putting it on display, and inviting people to come take a look.  It's not a bad thing by any stretch--those little museums can be a lot of fun.  But it allows them to skirt some of the deeper, more existential issues other museums can get caught up in.

For example: is a museum's primary purpose to preserve artifacts, or to educate the public?  Should they focus on conservation, or exhibitions?  Is it better to teach the visitors something new, or to make sure that they enjoy the time they spend at the museum?  Should new research take priority over increased publicity and marketing?

It's a chicken-or-egg conundrum that goes back to some of my earlier questions.  You can't maintain collections without a source of revenue, and you can't bring in enough revenue without appealing to paying visitors (or getting substantial private or government funding).  So how should a museum prioritize all of those important facets?

Personally, I'm torn.  As I mentioned last week, I owe my career and love of museums to a program that many institutions might see as superfluous.  I'm sure if you asked the curator in charge of the hall where I fell asleep in my green sleeping bag after a night of exploration, he would rather have more money for the preservation of the artifacts I was entranced by rather than education programs that allow 6-year-olds to scare themselves silly in mock Egyptian tombs.  But coming (as I do) from a retail and visitor-oriented background, I can't help but seeing the interaction the public has with a museum's collection as equally vital to an institution.  ...Well, maybe not equally vital.  If I was told that an artifact would deteriorate beyond repair if it was put on display, but could be used for research and study if kept in storage, I could accept that.  What I think I couldn't accept would be not making an effort to serve both purposes.

What do you think, small, but apparently loyal readership?  What facets of a museum are the most important?  When tough times hit, what gets cut and what gets saved?  It's only a partially rhetorical question--many institutions face this exact choice right now.

is it still a museum if no one sees the exhibits?

Last week I read Svetlana Alexievich's heartrending book, Voices from Chernobyl: the oral history of a nuclear disaster.  Alexievich is a journalist who interviewed people involved in Chernobyl--villagers, politicians, physicists, soldiers--for three years, and turned those interviews into the monologues that make up this astonishing book.  It's something everyone should read., and it details how little most people in Belarus knew about the dangers of radiation, and how little the government did to inform them.

One of the things that struck me most was an interview with Sergei Vasilyevich Sobolev, who discussed how the Soviet mindset contributed to the deception because they lied to themselves as much as the government lied to them.  In 1996, when the interview was recorded, Sobolev was gathering artifacts for a Chernobyl Museum.  It doesn't seem to be the official museum in Kiev, as he references an artifact there as being different than what he has, and I can't track much else down about either his Chernobyl Museum or Sergei Vasilyevich Sobolev himself.  But here's what he said that struck me the most:

"Now do you understand how I see our museum?  In that urn there is some land from Chernobyl. A handful.  And there's a miner's helmet.  Also from there.  Some farmer's equipment from the Zone.  We can't let dosimeters in here--we're glowing!  But everything here needs to be real.  No plaster casts.  People need to believe us.  And they'll only believe the real thing, because there are too many lies around Chernobyl.  There were and there are still."  (Alexievich 138)

Excerpted here it doesn't carry the weight it does as a part of the whole text, but I find myself both sympathetic and torn.  Learning how many people sacrificed their lives (and their health, and the health of their children and loved ones) without realizing what they were doing I understand the deep need for authenticity.  But that same authenticity almost certainly assure that your museum can only be visited by people who either still don't believe the radiation is dangerous or who are already so affected by it that wandering around rooms full of highly radioactive artifacts won't do them any more harm.

And this all gets to a deeper question, one that's not so far away from the old puzzler, 'If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?'  Is it enough for a museum to preserve history even if no one visits it?  Is a museum the collection of artifacts, or the collective experience of seeing the artifacts and learning the history?  The museum Sobolev describes certainly has an authenticity that the official museum in Kiev seems to lack, but if that authenticity comes at the cost of outsiders being able to begin to understand the experience, is it worth it?  Perhaps just knowing such a place exists is enough, perhaps that knowledge automatically balances what may be a less "real" exhibit, but it's hard to say.

Regardless of this existential puzzle, you should go read Voices from Chernobyl immediately.