Overview
Museums often stir controversy when they deaccession worksāformally remove objects from permanent collectionsāwith 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 ādeaccession denialāāthe assumption that deaccession is always wrongāand ādeaccession apologyāāwhen museums justify deaccession by finding some fault in the objectāas 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 executionāwhen masterworks were used as barter to pay the king's unpaid billsāas 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 āHoving affair,ā when the Metropolitan Museum of Art sold a number of works to pay for a VelĆ”zquez 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.
This book title, Deaccessioning and Its Discontents (A Critical History), ISBN: 9780262037587, by Martin Gammon, published by MIT Press (July 24, 2018) is available in hardcover. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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