Met director Max Hollein has a very good piece at the museum's website defending the position they've taken on deaccessioning, and also an interesting interview with Brian Boucher at artnet.
Some highlights from the latter:
- He makes the point that museums sell work all the time and no one bats an eye: "I think that sometimes even people from the field on purpose neglect the reality that museums have been involved in deaccessioning for decades. It’s not new. So this is something we can handle professionally. To suddenly say that it might be inappropriately handled, I think there’s a bit of a disconnect in that argument. I understand if criticism like that came from outside the U.S., but this is how museums have been practicing in the U.S. all along."
- On the works that would be sold: "We’re not talking about masterpieces. These are sometimes works on paper that are duplicates, or photographs that we own in multiples. And we don’t deaccession works by living artists."
- And he points out that "what we are considering doing, for this limited time period, is to actually allocate the funds that were already being generated from deaccessioning toward collection care and new funds being generated through our deaccessioning program, for this limited time period, not toward new acquisitions but toward collection care, meaning salaries and related costs of our employees who take care of the collection, such as conservators, mount makers, and collection managers. That’s the one change" (my emphasis).