I ♥ the Heartland: Speaking Gig at University of Iowa (Pollock Country); Rebuttal to Zaretsky

Pamela White, interim director of the University of Iowa Museum of Art, poses in front of her museum's Pollock "Mural" at the Figge Art Museum, with Figge's executive director, Sean O'Harrow

I made friends (and probably some enemies) in Iowa with my posts (here, here, here, and here) about the University of Iowa Museum of Art's (thus far) successful effort to prevail over those who would like to monetize the museum's major Pollock to help pay for flood-damage recovery. I've been asked to speak this Wednesday on "When Values Collide: Financial Asset or Cultural Resource," as part of the university's Elliott Society Lecture Series. This discussion, as distinguished from my recent New York-focused talk in Tarrytown, will concentrate on the regrettably ample deaccession lore involving university art museums.

My talk has become even more timely, in light of the recent debate that's been engendered by a provocative pro-deaccessioning piece published in Art in America magazine by the Art Law Blogger, Donn Zaretsky. I respect Donn's legal expertise, and we've had a reasonable-people-can-disagree relationship on this issue. But his incessant and increasingly strident Deaccession Diatribes on his blog have, to my mind, become increasingly unreasonable.

Perhaps my best rebuttal is my own Q&A with the UIMA's Art Matters blog, posted Tuesday to whet people's appetite for my talk. (Here's the press release for the talk, posted today.)

Let me also specifically debunk, in this post, Donn's two Big Ideas, which I shall paraphrase:

---If museum collections are, in fact, held in public trust, then there's no damage to that trust if the works sold by museums are purchased by other museums.

First of all, the buyers of important works sold by museums are only sometimes other museums. And even if the public patrimony does manage to remain in the public domain, it does so at significant cost to the public. Those sold works (as I explain in greater detail in the above-linked Q&A), are already our stuff. Americans for whom museums hold these works in trust shouldn't have to pay for them twice.

I believe that if a museum truly has no use for some works in its collection, it should give those works to another public institution (as happened here and here), not seek financial gain from another public institution. What's already the public's patrimony deserves to remain so, undisturbed.

The bigger of Donn's Big Ideas merits more serious consideration, because it contains a grain of truth (again, paraphrased):