In the new issue of Time I have a story that summarizes the various art de-accessioning dust ups of the past few months. If you’ve been following those closely there won’t be much in this piece that’s new to you. It’s written to introduce the controversies to the readership that hasn’t been following them closely, and I’m betting it’s a sizeable one. From time to time I survey reasonably well educated friends about stories that pre-occupy the artworld, and what I generally discover is that those reasonably well educated friends haven’t heard a thing about them.
One odd footnote. While I was reporting that piece I got in touch with the American Association of Museums to ask what steps, if any, they could take to enforce their generally sensible guidelines on de-accessioning. One of their press people told me that the most important was to strip a museum of its accreditation, a relatively rare action but one that he said the Association has taken in the past. Accreditation, he added, was important to a museum’s credibility and its standing in the public eye. At which point I asked for an example of a museum that had suffered that fate. The answer: the Association does not make public the names of museums that have lost their accreditation.
So much for that shaming mechanism.