Deaccessioning And Its Discontents

The first history of the deaccession of objects from museum collections that defends deaccession as an essential component of museum practice. Museums often stir controversy when they deaccession works—formally remove objects from permanent collections—with some critics accusing them of betraying civic virtue and the public trust. In fact, Martin Gammon argues in Deaccessioning and Its Discontents, deaccession has been an essential component of the museum experiment for centuries. Gammon offers the first critical history of deaccessioning by museums from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, and exposes the hyperbolic extremes of “deaccession denial”—the assumption that deaccession is always wrong—and “deaccession apology”—when museums justify deaccession by finding some fault in the object—as symptoms of the same misunderstanding of the role of deaccessions in proper museum practice. He chronicles a series of deaccession events in Britain and the United States that range from the disastrous to the beneficial, and proposes a typology of principles to guide future deaccessions. Gammon describes the liquidation of the British Royal Collections after Charles I's execution—when masterworks were used as barter to pay the king's unpaid bills—as establishing a precedent for future deaccessions. He recounts, among other episodes, U.S. Civil War veterans who tried to reclaim their severed limbs from museum displays; the 1972 “Hoving affair,” when the Metropolitan Museum of Art sold a number of works to pay for a Velázquez portrait; and Brandeis University's decision (later reversed) to close its Rose Art Museum and sell its entire collection of contemporary art. An appendix provides the first extensive listing of notable deaccessions since the seventeenth century. Gammon ultimately argues that vibrant museums must evolve, embracing change, loss, and reinvention.

Collection care is a fundamental responsibility for museums and other collecting institutions, and the foundation of collection stewardship is good collection management policies. The new third edition of Things Great and Small continues to be a comprehensive resource for developing, implementing, and revising collection management policies and includes new information for addressing prolonged or permanent closure of museums, wider parameters for collection storage environments, and sustainable collection management practices to cope with climate change. Drawing on more than 50 years of experience as a collection manager, educator, consultant, and AAM Museum Assessment Program peer reviewer, John E. Simmons reviews the most recent collection management thinking and literature, helps determine which policies an institution needs, and provides guidance on policy content. In this new edition, coverage of critical areas is expanded, including digital objects, intellectual property rights, deaccessioning, decolonization, standards and best practices, collection storage environment parameters, managing off-site storage facilities, health and safety, laws and regulations, risk management, and sustainable collection management practices. With more than 50 tables and charts and model policy templates, this major publication is aimed at museums of all kinds, historic houses and sites, and other collecting institutions.

Why has identity become so central to judging art today? Why are some groups reluctant to defend free speech within culture? Has state support made artists poorer not richer? How does the movement for social justice influence cultural production? Why is Post-Modernism dominant in the art world? Why are consumers of comic books so bitterly divided? In Culture War: Art, Identity Politics and Cultural Entryism Alexander Adams examines a series of pressing issues in today’s culture: censorship, Islamism, Feminism, identity politics, historical reparations and public arts policy. Through a series of linked essays, Culture War exposes connections between seemingly unrelated events and trends in high and popular cultures. From fine art to superhero comics, from political cartoons to museum policy, certain persistent ideas underpin the most contentious issues today. Adams draws on history, philosophy, politics and cultural criticism to explain the reasoning of creators, consumers and critics and to expose some uncomfortable truths.

Since it was first published in 2006, Riches, Rivals and Radicals has been the go-to text for introductory museum studies courses. It is also of great value to professionals as well as museum lovers who want to learn the stories behind how and why these institutions have evolved since the day the first mastodon bones, royal portraits and botanical specimens entered their halls. For this third edition, Marjorie Schwarzer has mined new resources, previously unavailable archives and contemporary trends to provide a fresh look at the challenges and innovations that have shaped museums in the United States. Schwarzer argues that museums are fundamentally optimistic institutions. They build and preserve some of the nation’s most extraordinary architecture. They showcase the beauty and promise of new scientific discoveries, historical breakthroughs and artistic creation. They provide places of inspiration and repose. At the same time, museums have succeeded in exposing some of the nation’s most painful legacies – racism, inequity, violence – as they strive to be places for healing and reckoning. This too, one could argue, is an act of optimism, for it expresses the hope that museum visitors will gain empathy and understanding from the evidence of others’ struggles. Schwarzer shows us how museums are rooted in a contentious history tied to social, technological and economic trends and ultimately changing ideas of what it means to be a citizen. Along the way we meet some notorious and eccentric characters including business tycoons, architects, collectors, designers, politicians, political activists and progressive educators, all of whom have exerted their influence on what is a complex yet nonetheless enduring institution. Major additions since the last edition include material on digital curation, emergent exhibitions about civil rights, immersive museum environments, continuing efforts to diversify the field, how museums' role in our increasingly digital society, and a new foreword by American Alliance of Museums President and CEO Laura L. Lott. Museums new to this edition include the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. Beautifully written and lavishly illustrated, the third edition of this accessible, award-winning book brings the reader up to date on the stories behind the people and events that have transformed America’s museums from their beginnings into today’s vibrant cultural institutions.

The internationally focused Dictionary of Museology reflects the diversity of cultural and disciplinary approaches to theory and practice in the museum field today. The museum world is changing rapidly, and the characteristics and social roles of the world’s approximately 100,000 existing museums are constantly evolving. In addition to their traditional functions of preservation, research and communication, museums are increasingly addressing issues related to social inclusion, human rights, sustainable development and finances, all of which are explored in this dictionary. Drawing on the support of an international editorial committee, including influential figures from the US, Canada, Brazil, Japan, Spain, Germany, France and the UK, this collaborative work produced by over 100 researchers from around the world provides an overview of this unique field by defining over 1,000 terms relating to museology. The Dictionary of Museology is intended for a broad spectrum of museum professionals, academics, researchers and students. The book will be especially useful to those working with international partners, since a common lexicon that conveys the complex reality of current social and cultural values is particularly vital for those working across borders.

Museum Collecting Lessons explains how and why museums meet their fundamental duty to collect. It is the first book of its kind to explore the diverse ways these unique institutions acquire what is preserved and used for exhibitions, programs, publications, and online applications. The 11 chapters that make up the volume are written by museum practitioners working in art, history, and science museums in the United States, Canada, and India. Together, the essays provide fascinating insights into a wide variety of significant acquisitions and museum collecting initiatives. The authors explain customary collecting methods, including donation, purchase, and field retrieval. Commonly shared acquisition denominators are also covered and include mission pertinence, quality control, the feasibility and legality of acquisition, personnel and volunteer involvement, and long-term retention assurances. The philosophies and realities presented within the case studies shine light on recent debates about who is included or excluded in museum collections – especially when it comes to race, ethnicity, gender, political perspectives, places of habitation, and economic status. Museum Collecting Lessons reflects upon past and ongoing issues relating to museum acquisition practices. Offering valuable insights about philosophical, practical, and ethical collecting practices, the book will be of interest to aspiring, beginner, and experienced museum professionals around the world.

How global contemporary art reanimates the past as a resource for the present, combating modern art's legacy of Eurocentrism. If European modernism was premised on the new—on surpassing the past, often by assigning it to the “traditional” societies of the Global South—global contemporary art reanimates the past as a resource for the present. In this account of what globalization means for contemporary art, David Joselit argues that the creative use of tradition by artists from around the world serves as a means of combatting modern art's legacy of Eurocentrism. Modernism claimed to live in the future and relegated the rest of the world to the past. Global contemporary art shatters this myth by reactivating various forms of heritage—from literati ink painting in China to Aboriginal painting in Australia—in order to propose new and different futures. Joselit analyzes not only how heritage becomes contemporary through the practice of individual artists but also how a cultural infrastructure of museums, biennials, and art fairs worldwide has emerged as a means of generating economic value, attracting capital and tourist dollars. Joselit traces three distinct forms of modernism that developed outside the West, in opposition to Euro-American modernism: postcolonial, socialist realism, and the underground. He argues that these modern genealogies are synchronized with one another and with Western modernism to produce global contemporary art. Joselit discusses curation and what he terms “the curatorial episteme,” which, through its acts of framing or curating, can become a means of recalibrating hierarchies of knowledge—and can contribute to the dual projects of decolonization and deimperialization.

In a documentarian investigation of the major LGBTQ archives in the United States, Queer Literacies: Discourses and Discontents identifies the homophobic discourses that prevailed in the twentieth-century by those discursive forces that also sponsored the literacy acquisition of the nation. Mark McBeth tracks down the evidence of how these sponsors of literacy—families, teachers, librarians, doctors, scientists, and government agents—instituted heteronormative platforms upon which public discourses were constructed. After pinpointing and analyzing how this disparaging rhetoric emerged, McBeth examines how certain LGBTQ advocates took counter-literacy measures to upend and replace those discourses with more Queer-affirming articulations. Having lived contemporaneously while these events occurred, McBeth incorporate narratives of his own lived experience of how these discourses impacted his own reading, writing, and researching capabilities. In this auto-archival research investigation, McBeth argues that throughout the twentieth century, Queer literates revised dominant and oppressive discourses as a means of survival and world-making in their own words. Scholars of rhetoric, gender studies, LGBTQ studies, literary studies, and communication studies will find this book particularly useful.