The Art of Deaccessioning

We should just make “The Deaccessioning of a Museum’s Collection” a permanent link. Every month a U.S. museum unloads a number of its gifter artworks from its collection, usually claiming that it needs to expand its mission by acquiring significant artworks (read: artworks with higher monetary value). We could argue the spectral benevolence of this gesture, but the fact remains that most of the time donors gift their artworks to an institution because they want it housed there, and because they want it viewed by its immediate community, regardless of its monetary value. According to Carol Vogel of the NY Times, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo sold 207 artworks at Sotheby’s for a total of $67.2 million. She applauds this gesture.

“Some patrons complained that the museum was selling off its history, but Albright-Knox officials countered that it wanted to boost its endowment so that it could further its central mission, collecting and exhibiting contemporary art. The institution is now doing just that. This week it said it had acquired 71 works by 15 artists in a part-gift, part-purchase arrangement from the contemporary art collection formed by Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, the Italian industrialist.”

A reminder of the complexities of deaccessioning:

Michael Asher’s untitled 1999 work is one of the most noteworthy Asher’s contribution is a shiny red catalog entitled Painting and Sculpture from The Museum of Modern Art: Catalog of Deaccessions 1929 through 1998 by Michael Asher.(5) As its title indicates, Asher’s catalog lists all the sold or exchanged works from MoMA’s Department of Painting and Sculpture according to MoMA’s records. Asher states in his introduction that the information was primarily compiled by a MoMA intern and circulated among MoMA’s staff for fact-checking. Despite these institutional-sounding procedures, distinguishable conflicts of interest between the artist and the institution emerge. In a disclaimer printed in Asher’s catalog, MoMA’s Chief Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, Kirk Varnedoe, cautions the museum visitor against attributing accuracy or comprehensiveness to the information therein. According to Varnedoe, Asher’s listing should be considered unreliable since “we have not been able to assure ourselves that the present list meets the criteria of completeness or accuracy we would require in a museum publication.”

By contrasting a museum publication with an artist’s publication, even one produced with the museum’s own resources, Varnedoe hastens to overdetermine the separation of the artist’s interests from those of the institution. In addition to investigating MoMA’s archival erasure (the files do not list the dates of deaccessions), Asher’s project analyzes the distribution and contestation of institutional authority. Varnedoe’s note expressing caution about the reliability of the project is the very element that enables Asher’s work to speak to its audience from an invested, yet discernible point of view.

More on MoMA’s “Museum as Muse” exhibition at BNET.

Tags: deaccession, Deaccessioning