Museums sold more art during the pandemic

Museums sold more art during the pandemic

The coronavirus has been tough on museums. An October survey for the American Alliance of Museums found that two-thirds had cut public programs, more than half had laid off or laid off staff, and nearly a third were still closed to the public.

Those who were open had spent an average of $ 27,000 on virus precautions and only had about 35% of their normal attendance. On average, museums expected to lose 35% of their budgeted revenue in 2020 and 28% of normal operating revenue this year. Twelve percent said they had a “significant risk” of closing permanently for this fall.

That has caused art museums to reconsider the ethics of selling parts of their collections. Controversially, the Art Museum Directors Association has established a temporary safe harbor against censorship or sanction for member museums that “discredit” works of art “to support the direct care of the museum’s collection.”

In October, the Brooklyn Museum of Art sold 10 pieces, including a Lucas Cranach the Elder painting, for $ 6.6 million at Christie’s and a larger group of works at Sotheby’s for $ 19.9 million. The money, along with future sales, will be used to create a $ 40 million endowment to support the care of the collection. At the same Sotheby’s sale, the Palm Springs Art Museum, which has been closed for a year, sold a Helen Frankenthaler painting for $ 4.7 million.

Under normal circumstances, the association prohibits museums that sell art from using the proceeds for operations or capital improvements. The proceeds can only go towards the purchase of more works of art. Museums that break the rule may be prohibited from borrowing art from other museums for exhibits, among other penalties. The moratorium on sanctions lasts until April 10, 2022.

But why not make the emergency measure permanent? Why not expand it to allow other uses of the sales proceeds? The moratorium opens a small crack in a poster that keeps a large number of works of art out of sight, hampers the flexibility of long-standing institutions to develop new strategies, and limits the availability of art to upstarts.

Most large museums display only 5% of their collections at a time. “As a general rule of thumb, consider the least distinguished object in a gallery, and you can be sure there are one or two just a little bit inferior, and a dozen almost as good, in a warehouse or basement,” wrote Michael. O’Hare, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, in a 2015 article calling on art museums to do more to encourage public engagement with art.

Of course, there is a danger that museums will sell timeless treasures to chase fads or overpay their executives. But as the successful backlash against the Baltimore Museum of Art’s plans to sell some modernist masterpieces demonstrates, people who care about a museum’s collection have ways of exerting their influence. Museum boards of directors and professional staff deserve the flexibility to make the appropriate tradeoffs to the circumstances of their institution, with or without a pandemic.