The first history of the deaccession of objects from museum
collections that defends deaccession as an essential component of museum
practice.
Museums often stir controversy when they deaccession works--formally
remove objects from permanent collections--with 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 "deaccession denial"--the assumption that
deaccession is always wrong--and "deaccession apology"--when museums
justify deaccession by finding some fault in the object--as 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 execution--when masterworks were used as barter to pay the
king's unpaid bills--as 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
"Hoving affair," when the Metropolitan Museum of Art sold a number of
works to pay for a Velázquez 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.
