Lee Rosenbaum reports that this fall "is fast becoming the Season of the Museum Disposals." The latest to get into the game is the Brooklyn Museum, which is selling off a work by Russian artist Vasily Vereshchagin. The museum says the work "merits greater study and exposure than it could get here." (It's kind of a Humane Society!)
It's a good thing that it's not the case that once an object falls under the aegis of a museum, it is held in the public trust, to be accessible to present and future generations -- because, if it were, that would really be a problem for this sort of thing.
