Museums are essential. Deaccessioning is essential. Part 3.
Why museums need to rethink how collections fit into their missions.
Maybe this is it. Maybe this is enough to turn around the aircraft carrier that is the museum field and set it on a new course. It is difficult to explain to people who care about and visit museums what it is like to make change inside these organizations. We are clinging to our operating models like drowning people cling to life preservers. Except this life preserver is an anchor that will kill us if we hang on. The way to salvation is to let go. Letting go is scary. There are many powerful people telling us that hanging on is the way to stay alive. Many of us, in our hearts, know it will kill us.
I did not set out to write this series of posts in response to the unspeakable police violence and necessary risk black and brown people, and white allies, are taking right now to preserve their own lives. But here we are, and this topic of museums and deaccession happens to be one tool we have that can help us let go, change course, and do better.
There are so many places this post could go, but I want to stick to the original point that in order to have equity in our operations, welcome new audiences, and promote dialogue, civic engagement, and action, we need to take a hard look at what we’re keeping and preserving. In Part 1 of this series, I explained what deaccession is, and how it is different from disposal of those deaccessioned collections. In Part 2, I explained why the policy statement by the American Association for Art Museum Directors regarding the use of proceeds from the sale of deaccessioned objects is irrelevant to most museums. Here I’m going to talk more about why we need to actively deaccession from our collections, all the time.
Collecting is like breathing
For us humans, oxygen comes in, it enriches our blood so we can live; carbon dioxide goes out. If we cannot expel the CO2, we are poisoned. It's the same in museums. We bring in new collections to enrich our blood - our missions, our programming, our connections to our community, the dialogues we encourage, the respite we offer - the aspects of our work that make us essential. As new collections come in that tell new stories, or provide new perspectives on old stories, some of the depleted collections must go out.
What? Our job is to preserve objects in perpetuity. What do you mean some things must go out?
Our job is not solely to collect and preserve objects in perpetuity
Our actual job is to collect and preserve essential illustrations of humanity. We cannot do this if we refuse to evaluate what stands the test of time as an important story, in light of all the new stories that are emerging every day.
We need to acknowledge that our field has not always been professional - we’re only on our third generation of trained museum people. Almost all of those first two generations, and many of this generation are white people. Untrained people collected with bias for a hundred years before trained professionals appeared on the scene. What many don’t realize is that most museum collections were assembled by lay people over generations without policies, steeped in racial, class, and cultural bias, sometimes illegally, and almost always without critical thinking.
For regional art and history museums, their collections are frequently composed of objects without any provenance, that illustrate no stories. They’re the detritus of capitalism and consumption - the victorian living room set of the local wealthy business owner, the french table service of the socialite, the christening gowns of every elite baby born in the county between 1850 and 1920. There is also literal trash in these collections taken in by untrained volunteers contributed by community members who confused the museum with the local thrift shop. For most museums, this is why deaccession is essential. We don’t have monetarily valuable collections but we aspire to have collections that tell the stories of our communities. We hope that those stories change and grow, and that our collections change (don’t grow) with those stories. Our real job is not to collect and keep, but to foster civic dialogue, and illustrate change.
Hoarding is not collecting
Many smart people have written about the difference between collecting and hoarding. Museums are hoarders. On the high horse of preservation, they demand more storage space, make excuses about intellectually and physically inaccessible collections assembled by elite white do-gooders’ capitalist motivations. They rarely do they accomplish tough work of removing objects from collections. Why? Because, as a field, we’ve made it an impossible task. We’ve told each other, and allowed the media to fan the flames, that deaccessioning is a terrible sin against the public interest. It is not. It is an essential task that allows us to keep doing our work.
The end game of museums that do not deaccession is either to continue expanding their storage spaces in a scenario where the opportunity cost is all other programming expenses. You spend money building more storage rather than having public programs. Or you do not collect the present or recent past because there isn’t space or resources to do so. The result of this scenario is that you pour resources into maintaining a biased, increasingly irrelevant collection that no one will support with dollars. Both scenarios end in organizational mortality.
Let us exhale so we can thrive
What we’re doing when we’re deaccessioning is trying to clean up this mess so that we can do our jobs in the present. We’re maintaining and sharpening the tools in our mission-delivery toolbox to do our jobs better. We’re trying to exhale the poison so we can take in the enriching oxygen of our present.
Collections become anchors. We need to let go of the things that are dragging us to the bottom of the ocean. We need to exist at that exact place where we’ve inhaled, our blood is enriched, the air fills our lungs and we are floating. The minute the air keeps us afloat in the water turns to poison, we must exhale.
Collecting is inhaling; deaccessioning is exhaling. We’re doing the hard work of maintenance, not just of individual tools, but of the whole toolbox. We’re doing our jobs. Celebrate deaccessions in equal proportion to new acquisitions. Let us do it. Encourage us to do it. This is how we stay afloat and alive.