Members of the Museum Directors’ Association have voted in favor of allowing American institutions to sell art to help pay for the care of works in their collections, the organization said Friday.
The vote reverses a long-standing policy that prohibited museums from using funds from sold works to pay bills. The rule was relaxed during the pandemic, giving him a two-year window in which those funds could be spent to maintain the collection while the financial institution deals with financial turmoil and plummeting attendance. I was.
Since then, museum leaders have engaged in sometimes heated debates about whether it’s time to make that policy easing permanent. We have decided to vote in favor of doing so. Of the 199 eligible members, 109 voted in favor of this policy and 21 voted against it. The rest of the institutions did not submit their votes.
Some art leaders and critics objected to the practice of selling items from museum collections, saying that art owned by institutions should, and mostly, be retained for the public good. I’m here. Some items could normally be sold, but they were assumed to be works that were either reproduced or not in line with the museum’s mission. Funds from the sale were to be allocated to other art acquisitions, not to underwrite staff salaries and other operating expenses.
The Board has the power to impose sanctions on members who sell their works to pay general operating expenses.
But during the pandemic, museums faced extreme deficits and some turned to de-membership to help pay bills. The Brooklyn Museum put the work up for sale, raising $40 million. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has begun taking advantage of relaxed restrictions on how funds are allocated. In 2020, the Baltimore Museum of Art announced that it will sell works by Bryce Marden, Clifford Still, and Andy Warhol. It said the sale would fund art purchases by people of color and pay raises for its entire staff. However, in response to criticism, the museum took the opposite course.
A new policy approved by the Association of Museum Managers defines where funds from de-membership can be channeled. The new rules state that the money can only be used for expenses related to the “direct care of the work of art”, i.e. the “storage or preservation of the work of art”. Examples of these costs include restoration processing and storage materials such as frames and acid-free paper.
According to the new rules, funds cannot be used for staff salaries or “expenses incurred solely for the purpose of exhibiting a temporary exhibition”. The previous rules had been in effect since at least 1981, according to the association.
In line with the association’s move to temporarily ease restrictions, the Metropolitan Museum of Art took about $7 million from the deaccession fund last fiscal year to help manage its collections, according to museum spokesman Ken Ken. Wayne said most of that money went toward salaries for collection care staff who were no longer allowed under the association’s rules. It varies, but over decades, a $10 million balance is typical, Weine said.)
Eric Neal, director of the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, is outspokenly opposed to giving museums the freedom to pay museum bills with money from art sales, but he has called for policy changes. said he voted in favor of How narrowly you defined where money can go.
“They put up some guardrails,” said Neil. “For me, this was a good, reasonable, prudent move forward.”
Thomas P. Campbell, director and chief executive of the San Francisco Museum of Art and former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, warned against easing restrictions. write in 2021 essay To do so could undermine the trust of the donor and lead to irresponsibility as a fiduciary on the part of the museum’s board. But in a statement on Friday, he accepted the restrictions written in the new rules, saying, “The new guidelines send a clear signal that the collection cannot be monetized at its operating costs.
Alex Nyarges, director of the Virginia Museum of Art, who voted against the rule change, said he believes the rule is a fundamental cornerstone of the trust the association has built with its donors. I think it’s an abandonment of the trust we’ve built over 100 years,” he said.