Show it or sell it!
February 15th, 2022
The March 2022 Reason magazine explains in “Free the Art! Sell the Art!” that public museums display as little as 2 percent of the artworks they hold (the rest in storage), and have a habit of buying up art only to hide it away for decades where nobody will ever see it or know it exists.
And, worse, the Association of Art Museum Directors has a policy enforcing exactly that!
My response:
It’s not often I say “there ought to be a law”, but there ought to be a law. Taxpayers do not fund museums for the purpose of hiding art in storage. Any work held by an institution that receives public funds should be on public display at least 6 hours a day for 100 days out of every 2 years (excluding limited periods for restoration or maintenance) – or promptly auctioned to the highest bidder.
Charitable foundations that fund museums should insist on the same rule.
February 15th, 2022 at 7:47 pm
I don’t know much about art. But I believe natural history museums have a similar situation: they own a lot of stuff they don’t display.
Some or all of it is available to researchers, and every now and then, there’s a story about a new discovery made by someone digging through old, neglected fossils. If the museums sold their undisplayed items to someone else, that opportunity might be lost.
Whether there’s anything comparable in the art world, I don’t know. And whether it’s sufficient to justify a tax-supported organization from warehousing their art (or fossils), I don’t know.
February 15th, 2022 at 8:56 pm
It’s not the same thing at all. Artists make things specifically so other people can see them. When museums purchase art with public money, the public should get to see it.
Fossils and minerals occur naturally and are collected by museums mainly for scientific purposes; they don’t have to be visible to the public to fulfil the purpose of aquisition.
February 16th, 2022 at 2:22 am
Do we need a law to force them to show it or sell it, or is there an existing law that is enabling this behavior, that we should repeal?