Wednesday, April 04, 2007

The Residue of Design

Lee Rosenbaum notes that "sometimes deaccessioners get lucky: A work that belongs in the public domain stays in the public domain." She's talking about one the works just sold by the Albright-Knox Gallery -- an Indian sculpture of the Hindu god Shiva, which went for a little over $4 million to, it turns out, the Cleveland Museum. As Lee notes, it will now join that museum's "superlative Asian art collection, a mere 200 miles away from the sculpture's previous home." Lindsay Pollock reports for Bloomberg here. Steven Litt has a story in today's Cleveland Plain Dealer here.

Of course, on some proposals for how to deal with the deaccessioning issue, this wouldn't be a matter of luck at all.