Tuesday, September 10, 2013

By the way: the Royal Geographic Society is repulsive

It's selling paintings to plug a pension deficit.

Serious question:  what kind of belief is the belief that deaccessioning (other than to buy more art) is wrong?  If you follow the debates at all, it certainly feels like a moral judgment:  it's repulsive, Stalinesque, beyond the pale.  So why don't we see the same sort of outrage from the usual suspects when, say, a U.K. museum sells work to plug a pension deficit?  If it's morally repulsive, it's morally repulsive, no matter where it happens.  Right?

So complicated, the Deaccession Police Handbook.