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Business logic that works in tech doesn't apply to museums. The ancients aren't making more and better history every year.

If you sell an irreplaceable object to make a profit at the end of the quarter, you can't just buy a new one when times are better. On the other hand, the ancients aren't making more history, so your collection never goes out of date. If you lay off all your staff, as long as you keep the collection in good storage conditions, you can hire new staff a century later and reopen just fine.

Museum policy that prevents dumping of assets is good policy. A museum that sells its collection is no longer a museum.

Amazing how HN frequently complains about Private Equity buying up tech companies and killing the golden goose for the sake of short term gains, yet the top comment suggests museums do exactly that. (Shrugs)

As opposed to the museum shutting down completely?

I mean, look, I agree, the idea of a museum selling an art piece to make ends meet leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. But I'd rather the museums stay open.

> As opposed to the museum shutting down completely?

Yes. Shutting down temporary for the short or even medium term is better for humanity,if that is the cost to maintain long-term public access

The primary purpose of museums is not profit or employment, but housing cultural artefacts. IMO it is better (for humanity) if all employees are furloughed or even fired, and the buildings shuttered until a time they are viable again - even if it's a whole new organisation that rises from the ashes or if collections have to be transferred to a different surviving museum.

...I think I may have been misunderstanding something here. If a museum goes bankrupt, what happens to their collection? Is there some legal avenue where they can keep everything in storage until they (hopefully) get more funding down the road?

I agree. In this particular case, there are short term gains, and there’s short term survival. Since long term survival requires short term survival, I, as a museum director, would do what needed to be done, even if such things would be looked down upon in better times.

I’ve always found it useful to not assume users on a website are a homogenous group of people.

I agree, although I do find it useful more generally to point out when common arguments conflict with one another. Contradictions aren't always obvious, so bringing them to light is helpful.

I'm well aware. However, voting is aggregate so I figure the top comment is representative of the zeitgeist.

I did not suggest killing the golden goose, I suggested selling the golden eggs, so that you can afford produce to continue keeping that goose alive and serviceable to the public.

Common misconception that museums exist to put things on public display, and the collection exists to serve that.

For any serious museum, it's the opposite: public exhibits are a nice thing they do, but not the most important. Maintaining the collection, and the research it enables, is mission #1.

And yet many serious museums have never offered their artifacts up to researchers for study, either because the researchers don’t exist, or because they have 1000 examples of a piece, 900 are in long-term storage, and are never planned to be used.

At some point in the past, all of these pieces were acquired from private collections. Why must the flow be one-directional?

The question you need to consider is: why didn't those private collections sell the objects themselves? No one forced them to donate to a museum.

Selling donated items is a direct violation of the concept of the donation. The whole point of donating to a museum is that it is one-directional. Anyone who wants to sell their stuff can do so themselves.

> And yet many serious museums have never offered their artifacts up to researchers for study, either because the researchers don’t exist, or because they have 1000 examples of a piece, 900 are in long-term storage, and are never planned to be used.

The offer is there, even if it has not yet been taken up.

You can't plan for what you don't know yet. Museums are exercises in long-term thinking. For example a fruitful path for finding new species today is to go back through museum collections that have been carefully kept in storage for future researchers.

Firstly, people choose to donate to museums over selling for a wide variety of reasons, ranging from philanthropic to less-than-philanthropic. I do not believe that selling donated items is a direct violation of the concept of donation, but reasonable people are allowed to disagree on this, I think.

I agree that the status quo is that donating to a museum is traditionally one-directional. I do not think it needs to be. Yes, people can sell things themselves, but it's often cheaper and easier to donate them to museums for a tax deduction, than it is to sell them at auction.

I totally agree that museums should be exercises in long-term thinking. One aspect of long-term thinking is fiscal responsibility. If museums are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, posting $100mm losses, they are not thinking long-term or being responsible stewards.

The world is not black and white, and I think it's silly that we should hold museums to black and white standards regarding their ability to borrow loans against some portion of their assets.

“We” are not unfairly holding museums to these standards, these are standards that museums have developed and set for themselves. I am just trying to explain why they did that.

I agree with you that business rules do not apply to museums.

I am not suggesting that a museum sell critical pieces of their collections to make a profit this quarter. I’m suggesting they sell or take out loans against the pieces of their collections that have never been on display and will likely never be put on display, so that they can continue to curate and display the pieces for the public to enjoy.

I’m suggesting that it’s hypocritical for a museum to claim that it exists in service to the public (as opposed to private collections), but to close its doors or gouge prices, as an alternative to selling or taking out loans on assets that have never been and never will be displayed to the public. From my perspective, a museum with closed doors and good storage is not a museum, it is a private collection with windows and a board of directors.

I realize this does not work for small museums. I specifically have the Metropolitan Museum of Art (and its cousin museums in other large American cities, which are run with similarly hyper-acquisitional).

It doesn’t make sense to me that these museums can continue to acquire art (a big expense), and lay people off. It’s putting art above people, which does not sound like a public institution to me, regardless of my beliefs about the commercialization of art.

If they sell or take out loans against (and, hypothetically, default on those loans) they have failed in their primary task, to steward their collection.

They're putting art and history, and, critically, many people's ability to learn from and appreciate that art and history 100, 200, 1000 years from now, above a few employee paychecks for a few months.

Public institutions should take a long-term view of their public duty.

If the art could be treated as an asset for accounting purposes, it would give museums and very strong incentive to collect pieces that command a high price. This would tend to weaken the internal standards of the community of artists and curators in favor of commercial standards. If you are skeptical of internal standards - if you think commercial standards should predominate - why have non-profit museums at all? Why donate to museums?

Even if you're of the opinion that the existing internal norms of the art world are bogus - as I think many are - it does not follow that market norms should supplant internal norms. Internal norms can change through deliberation.

It's not a matter of standards and norms, but objective reality. The art has value. It is an asset. It could be sold. To pretend otherwise is an act of deception. They're cooking the books. The question is why are they making fake books? The usual answer is to skim / profit / launder / etc.

In terms of how museums choose to curate their collections, I don't really care. That's their business, not mine. However economics exist whether they want to pay attention to it or not. They have bills. They have labor costs. At some point the lights get cut off.

Why would art as asset incentivize collections focused on high prices? Wouldn't there be an advantage to seeking out things that they think would increase in value over time?

Non-profit != charity. Many non-profit organizations are highly focused on the bottom line and given the high ticket price traveling exhibits I think that museums are not different in seeking the cultural relevance reflected by people's engagement, engagement that can be measured in how much they might pay for something.

Most museums are small and their collection is of little value except as a whole. This is especially true when you're talking about niche museums that are basically private collections that have been turned into non-profit museums so they could continue to exist in their totality by the heirs of the deceased collector. Treating their collections like assets would help them a little but not much.

Also, many small museums aren't "art" museums with semi-independent objects that have similar value to collectors anywhere.

Many of them have some sort of focus on the history of a place, person, community, people, industry, etc., and much of the value of the artifacts they house comes from the process of curating and contextualizing them to tell us a story about the past.

Because they're telling a story, they may also have replicas of artifacts they can't obtain which hold narrative/educational/illustrative value but fairly little collector value.

Another common genre is something like a house, restored to and preserved in roughly period condition. When these exist because a "significant" person or family built/owned/lived in the house, they'll likely try to obtain genuine objects they can connect to the people there. But they'll of course fill it in with other instances of objects they know the family owned, replicas, and best-guesses.

The person or family may only be locally significant, and the artifacts may have little independent commercial value. The main thing of value is likely to be the building itself.

> ...their collection is of little value except as a whole.

I agree that citation adds value to a collection. That’s why we pay curators, after all! But, I would also claim that the benefit of curation to the value of the collection as a whole probably scales with the size of the collection, if we’re talking about art or history museums. For instance, having an entire, working 1960s mainframe that’s used routinely for demonstrations at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View is extremely valuable, beyond the monetary cost it would take to acquire and set up the physical hardware. The same system, non working, and with “do not touch” signs all around, is significantly less valuable.

Likewise, a museum with the resources to pull off an exhibit like the Warhol retrospective that was at SFMOMA recently can a full picture of how an artist grows and develops throughout a career in a way that a single work, or handful of works, cannot.

This was the topic of a recent episode of Revisionist History. Museums, art museums in the case of this podcast, horde tons of material they simply pack away and none of them ever note the actual value in annual filings. Then, when in financial trouble, they fire people and want a bailout. It reminds me of the Rolling Stone article about Johnny Depp being 'broke', despite having earned half a billion dollars. He refuses to sell a single property of the couple dozen he owns even though he would immediately be solvent afterwards.

In short, they can right now.

There's an Association of Art Museum Directors. Usually, the consequence for selling art to pay bills would result in that museum being censured by the art museum directors. They announced a couple months ago that they are allowing a 2 year reprieve from those censures due to COVID.