Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: The pandemic has been particularly hard on cultural institutions, including art museums.
Speaker: Many have faced financial catastrophe over the past year, forcing extreme budget capex, including laying off staff.
Speaker: At the same time, many of these museums possess extraordinary wealth in the form of their collections.
Speaker: So the solution to their fiscal problem seemingly is right at their fingertips.
Speaker: But museums selling art leaves a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths.
Speaker: I think it's a bit like the Greek myth of Tantalus.
Speaker: He's desperately thirsty and standing in a pool of water, but when he bends to take a sip, the water recedes.
Speaker: You know, the collections are there, they're massively valuable, and the museums are desperately thirsty, but it's not so easy to take a drink.
Speaker: Now, normally at this time of year, I'd be packing my bags and catching the train to Philadelphia to exhibit at the Philadelphia Antique Show.
Speaker: The show is a non-profit benefiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Speaker: And in fact, over the years at that show, our firm has sold a number of pieces to the museum itself.
Speaker: This year, of course, the show is virtual.
Speaker: And so I'm sitting around here in New York.
Speaker: But to think through this deaccession dilemma, who better to talk with than my guest today, the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Timothy Rubb.
Speaker: Timothy has led the PMA since 2009.
Speaker: And relevant for today's conversation, he is also a former president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, or AAMD.
Speaker: Timothy, thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker: Well, thank you.
Speaker: I'm delighted to be with you.
Speaker: Now, in ordinary times, institutions are forbidden from selling their art, except in very narrow and specific purposes.
Speaker: Well, I should say they're not necessarily forbidden by law, but rather by the Association of Art Museum Directors.
Speaker: And the AAMD has a policy that states, quote, funds received from the disposal of a deaccessioned work shall not be used for operations or capital expenses and may only be used for the acquisition of works.
Speaker: So in other words, you can't sell off your collection just to help make ends meet.
Speaker: However, last April, with COVID becoming an existential threat to many institutions, the AAMD issued an emergency two-year moratorium, saying that they would not punish any museum or director who sell their works to keep their staff employed and their doors open.
Speaker: Now, some museums have raced to take advantage of that moratorium, sending major works to the auction block.
Speaker: Others have flinched at the idea.
Speaker: Some have even gotten in trouble, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, which last October drew harsh criticism for their plan to deaccession works by Bryce Martin, Clifford Still, and Andy Warhol.
Speaker: But Timothy, let's start with you in Philadelphia.
Speaker: Tell me, if you can, briefly, how has the PMA reacted to the moratorium?
Speaker: And have you and the board and the curatorial staff talked about the possibility of deaccessions?
Speaker: Yes, we have.
Speaker: And I can't imagine there hasn't been a museum in the country.
Speaker: Certainly, those that are members of the Association of Art Museum Directors that haven't had this conversation among staff and with their boards of trustees.
Speaker: It's in the air.
Speaker: And of course, it is a very interesting option to consider at this time when
Speaker: when the economy has laid waste to our cultural institutions and made it very, very difficult for us to manage our budgets in the short term.
Speaker: So we're always talking about deaccessioning and we do a good deal of it under normal circumstances.
Speaker: But yes, the pandemic and the stresses it's created on our budgets has really brought this into sharp focus.
Speaker: But you haven't arrived at the decision to sell any major works out of the Philadelphia Museum collection.
Speaker: We have not.
Speaker: So it's been about the end of this month.
Speaker: It will be just about a year since that exception to the professional practices of the AAMD was put in place by its board.
Speaker: We haven't because we've been working primarily on trying to engineer a strictly financial solution to the challenges we face.
Speaker: And again, I think that's probably true of most of our peer institutions.
Speaker: We've been obviously trying to sustain support amongst our donors and the community, our members and the like.
Speaker: And that's been really quite successful, I should say, that
Speaker: That donors and those who support our institutions have really stepped up in a significant way to provide annual operating support, really relief during the pandemic.
Speaker: Of course, we've taken, in our case, very drastic measures to reduce our budget because our earned income when we shut our doors essentially went down.
Speaker: to zero.
Speaker: And we found ourselves facing a really significant shortfall in terms of operating revenues.
Speaker: But what we did was take our medicine early and reduce staffing and reduce expenditures, in some cases to the bone, knowing that we had to sail very, very close to the wind to get through the pandemic.
Speaker: And
Speaker: If we could limit the amount of indebtedness that we created through operating deficits, we could come back faster and stronger.
Speaker: So that's what we've been trying to do.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So is it fair to say that you would only see deaccessioning as truly a last resort?
Speaker: And in this case, you haven't had to fall on the very last resort.
Speaker: We haven't.
Speaker: And of course, we're not out of the woods yet.
Speaker: So I think here and elsewhere, there will be further conversations about it.
Speaker: I should also say that I think you're right to characterize it as something of a last resort, in part because we've always segregated
Speaker: different kinds of assets in the museum and treated them separately.
Speaker: So our endowments, save for the income that they generate, are not used to fund an operating budget.
Speaker: Our collections have been separated as an asset class, so to speak, so that there isn't the
Speaker: the temptation or the demand to turn a valuable work of art into a financial asset and monetize it.
Speaker: And I think that's frankly a very good and strong policy for the long term.
Speaker: So let's talk about, you know, there are some museums, as I mentioned, that have taken advantage of this moratorium.
Speaker: You know, some high profile examples include, you know, as I said, the Baltimore Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, SF MoMA, and others that have either deaccessioned or attempted to deaccession important and expensive works.
Speaker: And I'm interested in hearing from you, you know, and I'm not going to force you to name names if you'd rather not, but I'm curious to hear your take on what you feel are some of what you might characterize as the sort of positive versus negative approaches to deaccessioning that you've seen during the pandemic.
Speaker: Well, it's hard to look at these and determine whether they're positive or negative.
Speaker: Again, I think in the long term and under normal operating circumstances, the prohibition against deaccessioning or monetizing works of art for operating costs is a good and useful policy.
Speaker: pursue.
Speaker: I think those institutions that have taken this step have done different things and amongst the, I think the most admirable, if you want to use that term, would be the approach taken by the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which deaccessioned a number of paintings to create an endowment.
Speaker: to provide for, as the AAMD's moratorium allows, to provide for funding of the direct care of collections.
Speaker: So they established, as many institutions have, a policy defining direct care of collections, what you could use these funds for.
Speaker: But what they did, of course, was to create an endowment that will help now.
Speaker: to a certain extent, but also continue to yield support for all of those important functions, insurance, storage, curatorial work, conservation, and the like going forward.
Speaker: That addresses both the short-term need, but it also sets the institution up by funding direct care of collections in the longer term.
Speaker: And clearly that's going to make a big difference for Brooklyn.
Speaker: On the other hand, the controversy stirred by the decision made and later retracted by the Baltimore Museum of Art was in one sense understandable because a small portion of the funds, and I think it's important to underscore that it wasn't the bulk of the funds that they would have developed or generated through the sale, but a small portion of the funds were going to be earmarked for things other than
Speaker: the direct care of collections.
Speaker: But as you know, one of the key aspects of that controversy was a disagreement which played out in public over the decision to sell truly important works of art masterpieces from the collection and the effect that that would have on the institution in the long term.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: In other words, these weren't necessarily works that were hiding away in storage closets and that no one would particularly miss.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: And, you know, in that kind of work of, as you put it, of things that are stowed away in storage closets, that kind of work, which I call housekeeping.
Speaker: of making sure you're not maintaining or keeping things that are not useful to you anymore is a good and important practice that goes on in virtually every institution.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: And it's a tedious but important part of maintaining a collection.
Speaker: You shouldn't keep what you can't use or is of no value or little or no value.
Speaker: And because it's taking up space and it's costing money to do that.
Speaker: So we all do that.
Speaker: as a matter of course.
Speaker: The problem is that- Right, but of course that's not going to raise a large amount of money quickly.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: It may yield some space and make the management of the collection a little bit easier, but it's not going to yield much in terms of income.
Speaker: At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, this is done routinely, particularly in our-
Speaker: our Department of Print, Drawings, and Photographs because we have a number of duplicate prints and we review them very carefully.
Speaker: And of course, once they're sold, they provide funds to enrich the collection through the purchase of other works on paper.
Speaker: I want to come back to this idea of what you're calling housekeeping, because I think there's some interesting themes to touch on there.
Speaker: But let's focus for the moment on this crisis that museums are facing during the pandemic.
Speaker: the moratorium that the AAMD has issued.
Speaker: Some museums have seen this as an opportunity to start to rethink their collections and their facilities, and yes, even their compensation.
Speaker: And the Baltimore Museum was criticized for the notion that they might take, as you say, a portion of the proceeds from this proposed sale to raise staff compensation.
Speaker: Now, I think, you know, what the director there, Christopher Bedford, would have said in defense is that this wasn't some kind of cash grab to try to boost the salaries of well-paid curators.
Speaker: This was really focused on raising the compensation for the lowest paid tier of employees and
Speaker: all done, I think, with a very sort of social justice mentality of wanting the museum to better reflect and serve the predominantly African-American community of Baltimore that it's supposed to serve.
Speaker: So that's just one example.
Speaker: But, you know, one thought that museums may have as they consider deaccessions is, well,
Speaker: you know, what is this going to say about our institution?
Speaker: What are our goals and how is this deaccession going to reflect those goals?
Speaker: So, you know, I sort of, I want to ask from your perspective, you know, how do you see the, or what do you see as the potential opportunities for that kind of thinking about deaccession, if there are, and what do you see as the pitfalls of that kind of thinking, particularly during a crisis?
Speaker: Yeah, perhaps I should start by laying out my own position, which is probably at this point considered pretty old school.
Speaker: And that is that I do think good fences make good neighbors and segregating the need for operating support and how that is secured from the care and development.
Speaker: a useful boundary to maintain.
Speaker: Why?
Speaker: Because the, you know, particularly with, and here we're talking about collecting institutions for most of us, our collections are really the heart of the institution, particularly if you're taking a long-term view of
Speaker: of its value to the community and to the field and the like.
Speaker: So that the ongoing maintenance and care, stewardship of that collection and its ongoing development, I think is not simply an important but a central goal of what we do.
Speaker: And that requires resources to be sure.
Speaker: And it can be a challenge as well financially and otherwise.
Speaker: But it's a task, a responsibility to which we have to attend on a regular basis.
Speaker: And I think, again, maintaining a kind of firewall, so to speak, between the care and development of the collection on the one hand,
Speaker: and the operations of the museum on the other is important, is a very important thing.
Speaker: Again, keep in mind that even the moratorium that the AMD has passed for these two years,
Speaker: for the direct care of collections, not for other purposes.
Speaker: So they're drawing a rather sharp boundary between collections and their care and the rest of the museum's operations.
Speaker: Even so, and again, under normal times, the prohibition against using deaccession funds for anything other than the development of the collection, I think is a useful one.
Speaker: Good fences make good neighbors.
Speaker: And I think that
Speaker: that it allows museums to care for the collections, to defend and support their continued development at a time when values continue to increase and the demand on monetizing collections has increased as well.
Speaker: Now that's an important point and I'll stop when I make this or after I make this rather, that for many of us,
Speaker: acquisition funds, the resources to acquire additional works of art to build and expand and strengthen our collections are difficult to come by.
Speaker: And very often, particularly with a collection like ours, the sale of lesser but nonetheless important works of art is a way to help us fund new acquisitions and to help us develop and strengthen and refine our collections.
Speaker: It's kind of our seed corn.
Speaker: in a way.
Speaker: And if that were diverted to another purpose, I think you'd see the activity around the development of the collection be diminished by that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So you've mentioned a number of times now this idea of a firewall between the collections versus operating expenses.
Speaker: What do you think are the risks if that firewall doesn't exist?
Speaker: What are some of the potential conflicts of interest that might come about if an institution were to do something like what the Baltimore Museum had proposed in October?
Speaker: Well, a number of them have been mentioned in many articles written about deaccessioning in the past year.
Speaker: I think it's, first of all, however useful it is.
Speaker: It may be to divert funds from the sale of works of art for the care of collections in the short term.
Speaker: It's debatable whether this is really useful as a long-term solution.
Speaker: Collections, just like anything else, are finite resources.
Speaker: And if we keep on monetizing them,
Speaker: to support operating expenses, that can only go on for so long.
Speaker: I guess it would be like cutting off your nose to spite your face in a sense.
Speaker: And, you know, there are prohibitions which we really don't talk about very much.
Speaker: against the use of endowments, particularly restricted endowment funds for operating purposes.
Speaker: There are legal restrictions in place to ensure that those funds are there to support
Speaker: in this case, the operations of the museum or specific activities in perpetuity.
Speaker: And only the income from those funds can be used.
Speaker: So that's another example of a protected asset that is designed to continue to support and help the museum function in the long term.
Speaker: So I think that collections, in the same way collections should be, the stewardship of collections should be thought of in that sense.
Speaker: You know, another thing that, that
Speaker: has often been brought up.
Speaker: And I think it's really important to keep in mind.
Speaker: How will donors feel about donating works of art and about the possibility of there being repurposed to provide annual operating support?
Speaker: We typically ask our donor community, and our donor community has been very generous in terms of providing
Speaker: annual operating support, gifts they make each year to a variety of purposes, to general operations, to programs and exhibitions, and so on.
Speaker: We also ask our donors on a regular basis, and again, they respond very generously to funding capital needs.
Speaker: If those boundaries were erased between, let's say, collections and operations, and we're not there yet, this is an extreme hypothetical,
Speaker: Yes, would it be simple for us to sell a very significant painting and fund the renovation of a significant portion of the museum or an expansion or fund a new program or increase salaries?
Speaker: But if we did so, what would our donors say the next time we go around asking for capital support or an annual fund donations?
Speaker: Would they say, be inclined to say, well, you can simply sell a work from your collection that's in the basement and use it?
Speaker: Thank you very much.
Speaker: So I think there is a risk there.
Speaker: And I think all of this masks, obscures an obvious point.
Speaker: And that is how we, the key issue is how we manage our operating costs and
Speaker: and focusing on endowment and building long-term financial resources for the operations of the museum.
Speaker: Now, most of the time, in point of fact, that formula works very well.
Speaker: We do receive an enormous amount of annual operating support from our donors and members.
Speaker: We do receive very significant endowment gifts.
Speaker: We do receive funds for capital improvements and expansions.
Speaker: As I said, most of the time this works pretty well.
Speaker: This time it didn't.
Speaker: But remember that this is a crisis of extraordinary proportions or dimensions rather.
Speaker: And even so, hopefully we'll soon be past it and we'll be back to normal operations again.
Speaker: So I don't think we should lose our heads and push in a direction that ultimately would be, I think, very dangerous for museums.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So the sort of the two central concerns that I hear then are, number one, the fear that it could be a slippery slope, that once you take a shot of adrenaline, you want another one.
Speaker: And then what's to stop you from really doing serious damage to the scope and significance of the collections?
Speaker: And then number two is, what does it do for donations for particularly legacy-minded donors?
Speaker: to see the works that they've donated to be sent to the chopping block.
Speaker: I actually had a listener suggest a question about whether families, donors or their families, are ever consulted when a museum is considering deaccessioning a piece that they've given.
Speaker: Is that a conversation that a museum might be able to have to sort of present the case for the deaccession to the donor and gauge their response?
Speaker: Yeah, that's a very good question.
Speaker: And in point of fact, we do quite often have those conversations.
Speaker: It's good stewardship, number one, to keep in touch with a donor or a donor's family if that donor is no longer with us.
Speaker: But it's important, even though in most cases we receive gifts on a restricted basis, that is there by definition, there are no strict restrictions on what the museum could do with a gift that's made on an unrestricted basis.
Speaker: We could sell the work if we want.
Speaker: But very often we do think about
Speaker: the donors, again, if they're still with us and the reasons they gave the work to us and the obligation that we have as stewards of the object to consult with them and say, we're thinking of
Speaker: of selling this to acquire another work of art or to put into a fund because the work is no longer useful for us.
Speaker: And we hope you'll understand.
Speaker: So we are always sympathetic rather to those kinds of questions.
Speaker: And that's part of, again, our responsibilities as good stewards of the collection.
Speaker: So does that change the calculus if you're aware that a donor is actually comfortable with a deaccession?
Speaker: I mean, it sounds like it makes you more sympathetic to the idea that that's a good piece for the museum to consider getting rid of.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it would.
Speaker: In some instances, donors are concerned about what the museum might do with the object in the future and donate it with certain restrictions.
Speaker: And we can choose to accept them or not, as the case may be.
Speaker: And in many cases, we do because we're
Speaker: that the object is going to remain an important part of the collection in the future.
Speaker: But even so, the very act of giving a work of art, even on an unrestricted basis to museum, is to put it
Speaker: the donor's trust in the museum and trusting that the museum will be a good steward of that object.
Speaker: That in itself is something that gives us pause and makes us, I think, reluctant to part with objects because again, if we've accepted them in good faith, we ought to be willing to keep them and utilize them for the benefit of the museum going public.
Speaker: But in some cases, again, when a decision for one or more good reasons is made to sell something, then I think, again, it's a responsibility of the museum to inform the donor, again, if he or she is still with us and make sure that they understand we're doing this.
Speaker: In most cases, they're fine with it.
Speaker: They understand our reasons.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's interesting.
Speaker: I mean, this leads to a question or a theme that is maybe a little thornier than what we've touched on so far, which goes to the heart of the sort of self-examination that institutions have to go through when they're thinking about their collections, which is to say that the collection ought to reflect the purpose and the mission of the museum.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But there are, of course, many different groups who have a stake in that, in the collection, in the viewing of the collection, in the treatment and care of it.
Speaker: And that includes, of course, scholars, curators themselves, the staff of the museum or of other museums, artists.
Speaker: There are the avid enthusiasts, the
Speaker: the annual members, the casual visitors, there are school trips, there are tourists, there are the members of the general public in the communities where these museums exist.
Speaker: There are a lot of different people who have some kind of stake in what's going on.
Speaker: And the mission of the institution has to take many of these competing interests into account.
Speaker: And those interests may change over time.
Speaker: So, for example, one issue that's of particular concern to many institutions today are minority communities, which in the case of many museums, like the Brooklyn Museum a few blocks down the street from me or the Baltimore Museum that we've mentioned, minority communities may actually be plurality communities or majority communities in these neighborhoods and in cities that these museums are serving.
Speaker: So, you know, I guess what I want to ask is whether you think museum governance structures as they exist now, generally speaking, are well equipped to adjudicate all of these diverse interests when it comes to both buying and then also deaccessioning artwork.
Speaker: I'm not sure that's so much a governance issue as it's a matter of how the museum interprets its mission at any given point in time and how it adjusts the interpretation of its mission to accommodate changes in the
Speaker: in the community that serves, shifting tastes and shifting expectations about what museums can do for their communities today, how they can engage with their communities and how they can enrich the lives of the audiences that they were founded to serve.
Speaker: As you know, museums right now are, I think, looking at this
Speaker: these interlocking or interrelated issues with more candor and far greater scrutiny than they have, at least in my professional lifetime.
Speaker: And I think what it's going to yield is...
Speaker: Not so much a shift, a seismic shift in collecting.
Speaker: In some cases it may.
Speaker: I think in most cases, museum collections practices and directions will be inflected in one way or another.
Speaker: I think that's inevitable.
Speaker: But I think where it will be reflected most clearly is in two ways.
Speaker: One is programmatically including the development of exhibitions and the presentations of collections.
Speaker: How are these considered?
Speaker: these core activities of the museum considered them and carried out in relation to the interests and needs, voices of these communities.
Speaker: And secondly,
Speaker: what kind of dialogue, and I think this is going to be an area of great change in the next few years, what kind of interaction and dialogue will take place between those various communities and the museum?
Speaker: I think that's going to yield a kind of much richer
Speaker: understanding and set of decisions made with respect to programming exhibitions, the presentation and interpretation of our collections.
Speaker: And I think that will be a very, very good thing.
Speaker: But what I think is also going to happen is
Speaker: far greater and richer two-way dialogue between the museum and those for whom our work is intended to benefit.
Speaker: That kind of interaction exists to a certain extent now.
Speaker: Many museums, including ours, have spent a good deal of time engaging communities over the last several decades, trying to understand audiences in a more sophisticated and thoroughgoing way and listening.
Speaker: to what they want because that's the key to engaging them and bringing them through the door.
Speaker: But I do think the events of the last year and the demands for greater equity in the museum are going to lead us well beyond where we were with those questions into this new territory.
Speaker: And I think will be very interesting and very productive.
Speaker: Music
Speaker: We'll be back with Timothy Rubb in just a minute.
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Speaker: Now, back to the show.
Speaker: What do you think of, so how to put this, you know, one of the priorities that Chris Bedford at Baltimore has spoken about, and as we've alluded to already in this conversation, is the notion that, you know, Baltimore is a two-thirds majority African-American city, and
Speaker: And the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art, I don't know what fraction of it represents African-American artists, but I would be shocked if it were as high as 3%.
Speaker: So there's obviously a huge disparity.
Speaker: Now, the museum's only purpose isn't just to display artwork by...
Speaker: I think there is probably a disproportionate number of Italians represented in the Baltimore Museum versus the number of Italians living in Baltimore.
Speaker: So I'm not saying there ought to be some kind of perfect representation.
Speaker: But I think there's a lot of people that are in the Baltimore Museum.
Speaker: leaving the firewall in place, but then considering the idea of deaccessions in order to reconfigure the museum's collections.
Speaker: And this is, by the way, activity that's allowed under the AAMD regulations even during normal times, which is if the work is being sold, quote, as part of the museum's effort to refine and improve its collections,
Speaker: then deaccessions can be permitted.
Speaker: How much do you think is reasonable for a museum to consider deaccessioning?
Speaker: And it's not obviously going to be possible to give a quantitative answer to this, but give me some kind of qualitative sense.
Speaker: I mean, if a museum wanted to turn over 20% of its collections to replace it with work representing a much broader group of artists and periods and places and regions, I'd
Speaker: What would you think about a move like that?
Speaker: Well, that's an interesting question.
Speaker: And the first answer I would give you is that depends on the institution and its own collections.
Speaker: It also, I think, depends on, as your question implies, on an appetite for
Speaker: for change in institutions that, you know, to be candid, are conservative by nature and in some ways, rightly so.
Speaker: As stewards of the past, keepers of collections that represent the achievements of the past, the inclination is to, you know,
Speaker: not only to keep those intact, but build those out and enrich those very important stories because it is our job to map out the complex, map out and then present to our publics the very rich and complex history of the arts any given period and in any given place.
Speaker: And so that, you know, to some extent, how we do that is a product of our own history.
Speaker: And I bring this up because we, you know, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is not comprehensive.
Speaker: We have focused in part because we kind of have divided up the world, so to speak, long ago between the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, which has a great collection of ancient antiquities and arts from the arts of Africa.
Speaker: and Central and South America and so on.
Speaker: We have tended to focus by contrast on art from the early medieval period, about 800 AD to the present.
Speaker: And we've also focused almost entirely on Europe and North America, and then also on East Asia, Japan, China,
Speaker: and Korea and South Asia, primarily India.
Speaker: So those areas have been traditionally where we focused and we've tended, at least in recent decades, to limit the development of art collection to those areas as well.
Speaker: Within them, we are always seeking to diversify our collections and think about newly emerging phenomena or the ways that the art of those periods in those places is being reconsidered at any given time.
Speaker: But we haven't, for example,
Speaker: branched out into new areas of collecting in part because they've never been really the focus of the museum.
Speaker: And to start now would be to have to divert a lot of resources towards those.
Speaker: And other museums can do them in our stead.
Speaker: So for me, the question leads in two different directions.
Speaker: Should we
Speaker: map out new territory and expand the coverage of our collection and different directors will answer that perhaps variously.
Speaker: My answer is no, I'd rather focus on what the museum has specialized in historically and continue to do that.
Speaker: we reconsider American 19th century or 20th century art, European art, British art, French, Spanish, and so on during the period that's covered in the collection.
Speaker: How are those fields being redefined, reconsidered?
Speaker: And does our collection reflect this new thinking and the new possibilities of collecting in these areas?
Speaker: And so we're always coming back to this remarkable renewable resource, which is our collection and understanding it through, by reframing it through different perceptions and different ideas and different understandings.
Speaker: Just one example of that, which I think is really interesting and really important.
Speaker: is that we here at the museum for many decades now have focused a lot of our attention in a number of fields on the vernacular arts, folk art, and so on from different cultures in different periods.
Speaker: So we have a tremendous collection now of outsider art by American artists, particularly of the last several decades.
Speaker: But we also have in our great collection of Indian art, a very broad array of things, not simply what you would consider the arts of the court or high culture, but also vernacular arts, the arts of the village.
Speaker: And we've recently had a number of conversations around continuing to collect art.
Speaker: the art of the village, the art of the vernacular in India and in other cultures as well.
Speaker: So it's, I sort of gone far afield in answering your question.
Speaker: And I think that it, what I've left out of my answer is whether or not the museum like ours can and should make very significant shifts.
Speaker: in response to the changing demographics in our own communities.
Speaker: I think there's a compelling reason to collect works of art that our visitors see themselves reflected in.
Speaker: And so clearly it's been important to us and will continue to be important.
Speaker: to us to collect, for example, African-American art, to rethink what we collect and expand perhaps in the field of Latinx art and these newly emerging and very important areas in terms of our contemporary culture.
Speaker: Well, that leads nicely into the housekeeping question that we tabled earlier, because the deaccessions that have drawn the most scrutiny have, of course, been big ticket items, six, seven, eight figure pieces being sold to raise large amounts of money very quickly.
Speaker: But of course, the vast majority of objects and artwork that belongs to museums is not that.
Speaker: And it depends on the institution.
Speaker: But there are, of course, a number of museums in this country that have amassed collections that are
Speaker: vastly larger than what they are able to put on display.
Speaker: And there are even cases where the collections are so large that it's rather difficult for institutions to care for them.
Speaker: You know, there's a finite number of curators and finite number of hours in the day.
Speaker: And when the number of objects in your collection approaches the infinite, well, you have a mathematical problem.
Speaker: And, you know, Robin Pogerman at the New York Times has done some quite interesting reporting on this and looking at the expansion of collections of American museums over the past several decades, which in some cases has been...
Speaker: truly enormous, hundreds of percent increases in the size of collections, which usually do not accompany similar expansions in the size of the museum's square footage, its exhibition space.
Speaker: So, you know, there are, as we've talked about, multiple purposes that a museum collection serves, and a visiting public looking at pictures hanging on the wall is only one of them.
Speaker: But I do have to wonder at a certain point, um...
Speaker: what purpose is being served by additional acquisition?
Speaker: So my question is whether acquiring these, and again, I'm not going to name names and I'm not accusing any particular museum of doing this, but speaking generally,
Speaker: Would you say that acquiring and maintaining these extensive collections, is that an appropriate use for museum funds?
Speaker: And is it in fact possible for a museum collection to grow to be simply too large?
Speaker: And if that is possible, what can be done to address that issue?
Speaker: Well, it's an interesting question.
Speaker: It's one that we wrestle with here at the Philadelphia Museum of Art every day because storage is finite and the resources for caring for collections are infinite, are finite as well, including the number and hours, as you put it, of our staff.
Speaker: It's not as if these problems emerge or these questions emerge full blown overnight.
Speaker: Collections are developed over a very long period of time incrementally.
Speaker: And sometimes it is a bit surprising
Speaker: to realize as you take a look back about how much has actually been acquired by the museum.
Speaker: And I think at that point, you are, whatever the reason for those acquisitions, you are required to ask, do they still serve some useful purpose?
Speaker: And the answer, of course, is sometimes yes and sometimes no.
Speaker: If not, then you are obligated to review the collections, ethically obligated, I believe, to review the collections and dispose of those things appropriately.
Speaker: There's a whole set of procedures for this at any museum, including ours, and dispose of them so they don't simply take up space and serve no useful purpose anymore.
Speaker: It takes a lot of time and energy to do that.
Speaker: What keeps collections of this type in place is simply inertia.
Speaker: But still, I think it's important to ask that question again and again and again.
Speaker: And museums do.
Speaker: We certainly do.
Speaker: And that's what I meant when I used the term housekeeping before.
Speaker: It's part of the work of our curators and our conservators and registrars to periodically review the collections to identify parts of the collections, individual objects, sometimes groups of objects that are no longer useful because they don't serve the mission or because they're just marginal in terms of their importance to the history of art and basically deaccession those and then to use those funds for another and more productive purpose.
Speaker: Now, that said, as you pointed out, there are a lot of reasons that museums assemble and continue to develop their collections.
Speaker: One of which is, to be sure, public display in their galleries and the loan of works of art to other institutions.
Speaker: And that's a very important part of the aspect of what we do with our collection.
Speaker: But we also, as you suggested, hold collections for other reasons, for research and particularly when collections, as is the case with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in terms of our, let's say, our American furniture or the works of the great photographer Paul Strand or the life and work of the great modernist Marcel Duchamp.
Speaker: Philadelphia is the place to go to study those artists and their work in its entirety.
Speaker: go to do that.
Speaker: So serving as a great and enduring intellectual resource for the ongoing study of the history of art, history of key figures in it, is a really important part of what we do and how our collection is utilized.
Speaker: The other thing I will want to point out, because it's a relatively recent phenomenon and a very important one, and that is that
Speaker: With the advent of digitization and the gradual lowering of cost of taking photographs and digital photographs and transmitting images across broadband, we have now the ability to share our collections digitally near and far in ways that were
Speaker: unimaginable even 10 or 15 years ago.
Speaker: And so I think it's a matter today of redefining the utility of a collection and understanding that access to a collection is not simply a
Speaker: through the curated display of works of art in the galleries, but also digitally in terms of sharing that, again, near and far.
Speaker: It's interesting.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: A listener actually suggested a question on that subject, which is when a museum deaccessions a work,
Speaker: Do they typically maintain their records, their online catalog, entry, photos, notes, that sort of thing, so that the knowledge and information is still visible, at least on the Internet?
Speaker: We do in our files.
Speaker: I think when we deaccession something, we typically remove that from the catalog or our collection on the Internet.
Speaker: I wonder if there would be some...
Speaker: utility, and particularly if a museum is considering a deaccession, say, of a large group of redundant pieces, whether there might be some utility in at least keeping a catalog entry online.
Speaker: As a
Speaker: As a dealer in antique silver, I often find myself trying to trace the histories of pieces, where they've been, what's happened to them.
Speaker: I may find references to objects, but then it's impossible for me to find a photograph of them.
Speaker: And just for research purposes, it could be quite handy, I think, to have access to that information, even if the piece no longer exists physically at the museum.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a good suggestion.
Speaker: I would say that if, again, we had the resources to do it, we would probably want to do it.
Speaker: that and make them available online.
Speaker: Right now, it's still a challenge to digitize a collection that's the size of ours and to continue to add all of the data on collections that we actually have rather than those objects that we've sold.
Speaker: So I think it's a matter of a very practical choice right now.
Speaker: So one more question just on this subject.
Speaker: You refer to housekeeping as an ethical obligation.
Speaker: And I wonder the mechanisms that are in place to encourage curators in particular to review their collection, the collections within their purview and determine which pieces may be redundant or may no longer seem to be of the level of quality or rarity or interest that
Speaker: such that they still belong in the collection.
Speaker: Are those mechanisms sufficient, do you think?
Speaker: And I'll just say, from my perspective, looking at a number of large museum collections, it just doesn't look like they are, because these collections, many of them include...
Speaker: tens of thousands of objects or hundreds of thousands that really are not of such a quality that they are likely ever to be displayed for the public, probably never to be loaned to another institution, and frankly, in many cases, not of any great value to researchers either.
Speaker: And yet, as you say, it takes a great deal of work to go through the process of deaccessioning them, deciding to deaccession them and then deaccessioning them.
Speaker: And in the meantime, they are cluttering up storage spaces.
Speaker: They are or they should be consuming conservationists' time and effort and
Speaker: Do you think that there is a reason for at least some museums to consider rethinking those mechanisms and creating a much more ambitious program for deaccessioning these kinds of objects?
Speaker: Well, I do.
Speaker: And I think you've hit on a very, very important point and a bit of a sore one with many of us in the field.
Speaker: And that is there are a lot of things that
Speaker: not languishing in basements because they should be exhibited on a regular basis.
Speaker: To be sure, we have plenty of objects that should be displayed more often.
Speaker: But we also, I think again, primarily through inertia, we have a lot of things that remain in storage that simply need to be
Speaker: evaluated and a thoughtful judgment made about whether or not they should stay in the collection.
Speaker: In many instances, I think the answer would be no, they don't need to stay in the collection and they need to be disposed of.
Speaker: The one thing I can say that I think is really important in this regard that pulls in the other direction is that
Speaker: The procedures for deaccessioning are quite rigorous and they require research and a review of individual objects and their relationship to the collection, their provenance, the touch on the topic that we spoke about earlier, and
Speaker: and an assessment about whether or not they should, of course, remain in the collection.
Speaker: And when you go through this process, I think it is inevitable that most of your staff, your curatorial staff,
Speaker: will come to fairly conservative or cautious conclusions about objects, wanting to make sure that something that they are assessing now will not be reevaluated in the future and found to be worthwhile keeping.
Speaker: And of course,
Speaker: The history of the development of museum collections and deaccessioning from them is full of those kinds of cautionary tales of things being sold at a moment in time when they might be out of fashion or might not be well understood.
Speaker: only to come to the fore in ensuing decades and be reconsidered and reevaluated and thought to be rather more valuable than perhaps they had been considered in, let's say, the 1930s or 1940s.
Speaker: So a good deal of circumspection needs to be applied to
Speaker: to the analysis of deaccessioned objects or proposed objects that have been proposed for deaccessioning.
Speaker: And I think in the balance, that's a very good thing, quite frankly.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I mean, there, of course, is going to be risk in either direction.
Speaker: On the one hand, risk of making the mistake of selling things that you later wish you had kept, in which case, presumably, you'd have to go about trying to buy them back or buy something similar back again.
Speaker: It takes more money and more time.
Speaker: On the other hand, there's the risk of
Speaker: of sort of paralyzing the collection in piles upon piles of pieces that you just don't have the time to sort through and figure out that in fact they don't belong there.
Speaker: It's
Speaker: I don't envy the position of trying to adjudicate those risks.
Speaker: But I do have to say from the outside, at least when it comes to some of these larger museum collections, it seems that on balance, the risk aversion has leaned very far in the direction of holding on to as much as possible rather than
Speaker: letting go when perhaps it's time to let go.
Speaker: But I'm inserting maybe a little more of my opinion than I ought to here.
Speaker: I take your points.
Speaker: That's okay.
Speaker: I would agree with you that it's a...
Speaker: It's a firmly entrenched habit of mine to hold on to things.
Speaker: And as I've just said, there are good and compelling reasons to be circumspect about deaccessioning objects.
Speaker: On the other hand, you're right, it shouldn't paralyze institutions like ours.
Speaker: But often, what I think you need to realize is often it's an almost overwhelming proposition because we, and I'll just speak about the Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Speaker: We're dealing with the legacy of decades, literally decades, of acquiring objects that sat in storage and weren't given proper attention.
Speaker: And in some cases, when they are, the decision is made, yes, that it no longer should be in the collection.
Speaker: But it is also a place where great discoveries continue to be made.
Speaker: And I think that's something to keep in mind, that these are places in which things are waiting to be reconsidered and rediscovered and brought to light again.
Speaker: And that's an important part of our work as well.
Speaker: Well, I want to raise just one more point of concern about the world of deaccessioning.
Speaker: And you've been very generous with your time.
Speaker: I appreciate it.
Speaker: But I wonder, and this is a question that a dealer just has to ask, which is,
Speaker: You know, the more material that belongs to museums and institutions, the less, of course, that there is out on the private market and in the world for collectors and dealers to seek.
Speaker: And there is a supply and demand effect.
Speaker: The less that there is available in the private market, the higher it drives prices.
Speaker: I certainly have witnessed this when it comes to certain categories of antique silver, which have been so sought after by museum collections that actually there are scarce examples of it left for a private collector to pursue.
Speaker: And I wonder if you share at all the concern that I have about the inflationary effect that this has on the art market.
Speaker: Because, you know, it does, I feel, contribute toward this perception of art collecting and by extension, the whole world of artistic interest to be one that's available really only to the very wealthiest.
Speaker: You know, if you look at auction results for similar kinds of objects over the last hundred years, you know, there's an incredible, incredible amount of inflation of prices.
Speaker: And now I'm not going to suggest that.
Speaker: Museum collections are entirely or even primarily responsible for it.
Speaker: But I do think it's hard not to imagine that these collections don't play some role in impacting, influencing the market in that way.
Speaker: So I just wonder if that's a topic of consideration or concern for museums.
Speaker: You're not dealers.
Speaker: You're not trying to turn a profit on your collections.
Speaker: But you do have a stake in the same world that the rest of us have a stake in, which is cultivating interest among new generations of collectors.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it's a very good question.
Speaker: And as the way you put your answer suggests, it can be argued from various points of view, some of them partisan.
Speaker: There's no doubt that over the last...
Speaker: particularly over the last 30 years, but far longer than that, the increase in value and the rise in prices of works of art from virtually every category you might imagine, Asian art, American, European ceramics, silver photography, very few media,
Speaker: Very few fields have been unaffected by this.
Speaker: That's been a fact of our professional lifetimes and it's a challenging one.
Speaker: To be sure, I think a lot of that, as you've been suggested, is a function of demand and supply and the fact that there are fewer great things out there.
Speaker: But also, I do think it's also a function of, not so much a function of museums taking a lot of things off the market.
Speaker: And over time, of course, that has happened.
Speaker: But perhaps more compellingly, really a function of increasing demand in two senses.
Speaker: One, that there's
Speaker: We're far wealthier society than we were 30, 40, 50 years ago.
Speaker: And there are simply more people collecting and willing to pay greater and greater sums in many different fields.
Speaker: The second thing which I've watched with some fascination over a long period of time is the increasing demand on a global scale for art, that there are new players coming into the market from different countries seemingly every year equipped with enormous resources.
Speaker: to acquire works of art.
Speaker: So I think the demand side of the equation has been the far more dynamic one and the major contributor to this, the run-up in prices and to your point, increasing scarcity of product, of works of art to buy and sell.
Speaker: The thing that's been fascinating about this to me is that
Speaker: The one area that in theory at least should be unaffected by this because production continues is in the field of contemporary art.
Speaker: But in point of fact, it's in the contemporary field where we've seen, I think, the greatest increase in prices and valuations over the course of the last several decades.
Speaker: And that's not a matter of supply to a large degree.
Speaker: It's a matter of just a remarkable surge in demand.
Speaker: And a lot of collectors moving into that part of the market, as you know, it's been one of the most robust parts of the art market.
Speaker: And in some ways, given the cost of things, one of the most confoundings.
Speaker: Well, we started this conversation on the subject of the AAMD moratorium on deaccessions.
Speaker: So having taken quite a fascinating, if very circuitous route around that theme, just to close things out, I should ask, what's your evaluation of that moratorium?
Speaker: We're about halfway through, you know, it was...
Speaker: proposed as a two-year moratorium.
Speaker: Do you think it's had a positive effect?
Speaker: Do you think two years is enough, too much?
Speaker: Should it be extended?
Speaker: Was it a mistake to make it so long?
Speaker: What's your overall thinking about that moratorium?
Speaker: Well, if I were to look at this statistically, I would say that we have too few data points yet to really determine
Speaker: whether it's been a useful tool for museums like ours, the membership of the AMD to help during this pandemic and the fiscal crisis it has created.
Speaker: I will say that I think as a short term remedy option,
Speaker: that it strikes me as a useful thing for directors and boards to consider.
Speaker: But I want to underscore that I think its value is in the short term.
Speaker: doesn't mean that the issue is going to go away.
Speaker: I think the question of whether the funds from deaccessioning can and should be used for the direct care of collections on a long-term basis is something that's going to be vigorously debated within the field for quite some time.
Speaker: But again, in the short term, I think it is and probably will continue to be useful.
Speaker: Again, my concern, and I brought this up before, is really about this as a long-term change because I do think that, well, we were just talking about scarcity, we were talking about the increase in the prices of works of art.
Speaker: That has made, as I'm sure you well know, that has made it increasingly difficult
Speaker: for museums to be competitive in the marketplace, to be able to pay the cost of works of art that we judge to be masterpieces of very, very high quality, and to be competitive in the field in terms of acquiring things to develop our collections.
Speaker: And for me then, that speaks to the continued value and perhaps even the increased value now of limiting
Speaker: the proceeds from sales of works of art to the enrichment of our collections, because it is, as I put it before, it's a source of seed corn for the ongoing development of our collections.
Speaker: In those instances where we've done something more than housekeeping,
Speaker: in recent years sold some American furniture or a painting from the collection.
Speaker: We've done so purposefully to acquire something that's far more important and better.
Speaker: And we've funded that acquisition partly through deaccessioning.
Speaker: and partly through raising funds from donors.
Speaker: If we had to do that only by raising funds, we'd be facing an insurmountable obstacle.
Speaker: So I would say right now, perhaps more than ever, and certainly for the foreseeable future, being able to use those funds to redevelop and refine and improve the collection is more important than it's ever been.
Speaker: That's our show today.
Speaker: Thank you so much to Timothy Rabe and the Philadelphia Museum of Art for this conversation that I can only hope was as interesting to you as it was to me.
Speaker: I know this one was a long haul, and we didn't technically have a curious object.
Speaker: But never fear, we'll be back next episode with a very curious, definitively objective object.
Speaker: This one from the Corning Museum of Glass.
Speaker: Something to look forward to.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit, and I'm your host, Ben Miller.
