Alexander Stoddart's Coila (from bbc.co.uk)
The University of the West of Scotland have donated to the National Trust for Scotland a foot-high statue by Alexander Stoddart in the hope it can be auctioned to finance a whole museum about Robert Burns.
Wait, what?
So let me get this straight: stuff that goes into a museum cannot be sold to pay the bills or plug budget gaps (forget the Yanqui Difference in “buying more art”), but art can be donated from an educational institution to a national heritage trust and auctioned to build a museum?
But if that art was inside the museum, oh no, you couldn’t possible auction it afterwards.
Is that the actual limit of museum ethics? Museum walls?
Let’s just assume that all museum ethics are equal, that the general importance of every rule is on a par. Considering the amount of noise made over deaccessioning, I know I’m raising the status of a lot of guidelines. So with that in mind, isn’t this like building a museum based on plunder?
Deaccessioning, selling art, breaching public trust – bad, right?
Looting national heritage, plundering culture – also very bad, yes?
Both equally highly-debated and enforced aspects of the museum industry. Building a museum on cultural blood money, we still feel the effects today with repatriation trying to correct the wrongs. In this case, the museum is deaccessioning/breaching public trust before it’s been built! What happens when that auction is won by an overseas businessman? That artwork is lost from the public and lost from the nation. But don’t worry, it was never within the museum walls. When those walls are built, you can expect it to be the bastion of obeying deaccessioning rules with nothing ever leaving the public trust.
We wouldn’t dare dream of something like that happening in this museum.
(If there is anyone who can argue how this fits into museum ethics, then I would like to hear it. If the ethics are dependent upon the actual founding of the museum to provide a definition and a boundary, then its not ethics, is it? It’s dogma)
I say sell away!
I look forward to visiting the Robert Burns museum someday.
Well, yeah, I say sell as well. What I want to know is if the selling of art to build a museum that cannot deaccession to build some more (for instance) is ethical?