Another Day, Another Deaccession
Hot off the Zaretsky v. Knight boxing match, ignited by Zaretsky’s Art in America article on deaccessioning, comes a new deaccessioning, this time from the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, N.J.
We’ll cover the Zaretsky v. Knight fight soon, but for now this new deaccessioning by the Montclair Museum serves only to strengthen Donn’s claim that museums will find other creative means to sidestep the strict Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) regulations.
From the Wall Street Journal:
On March 23, after a “strategic review of its operations and capitalizations,” the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, N.J., announced … the sale, or “deaccession,” of 50 works from the museum’s permanent collection, among them a Jackson Pollock drawing valued at $300,000 to $500,000 and several Hudson River School and American Impressionist works with estimates ranging from $25,000 to $300,000, according to a prospectus prepared by Christie’s. The auction house believes the sales will generate between $2.9 million and $4.3 million for the institution, which says it will use the funds for future acquisitions.
James Panero, the WSJ journalist seems to take a similar anti-deaccessionist position as that of Lee Rosenbaum, Tyler Green, Christopher Knight, and countless other anti-deaccessionists, guided in large part by emotive and non-sensical reasons.
To read Christopher Knight’s personal attack on Zaretsky, bloggers, Art in America, and to some extent Zaretsky’s argument in Art in America, click here (note Knight’s lambasting of blogging as a critical apparatus, yet delivered via the same means Knight critiques–a blog). Zaretsky’s on-point counter-attacks can be read on his blog, here (and there are quite a few of them).
Christopher Knight:
April 16th, 2009 at 11:31 am
lambast, verb (informal) “to thrash or scold severely”
Here’s how I lambasted blogging as a critical apparatus in the post to which you refer:
“…to my knowledge he’s never made a sustained argument explaining [his position]. Usually it’s just asserted in a quick comment on a deaccessioning story in the news, in a snarky reference to a quote from someone else (including me) or even as a stand-alone non sequitur. Such is the nature of routine blogging.”
Wow! What a thrashing! Call 911!
Routine blogging is not conducive to extended argument, as I know because I do blog. As I also know, it’s easy to step outside routine–if one actually has a sustained argument to make about a major issue.