A-K deaccessioning, cont.

Continued from yesterday.

And that's the irony: The Albright-Knox thinks that the only way it can survive as a collecting institution of modern and contemporary art -- which is what the museum has been for over 100 years -- is to continue to collect. And that the only way to focus on its collection is... to sell off part of its collection, the parts that it thinks don't fit its mission.

"The one thing no one really wants to listen to or address is that these collections had never been developed," A-K director Louis Grachos says. "Not once in our history had we brought in a specialist in the Asian collection or given the material the kinds of resources that we would need. Likewise with antiquities and the older art. There's never been a commitment in terms of scholarship or agenda."

And according to Grachos, there isn't going to be one. With the A-K's planned deaccessioning, Grachos and his trustees are conceding that they don't have any chance of ever having enough money to do any of those things. The planned deaccessioning is, more than Grachos probably wants to admit, an admission of regional defeat, an admission that the A-K, in economically struggling Buffalo, has no chance to raise money to hire curatorial staff in those areas, to launch exhibitions in those areas, or to display those works in proper contexts.

Even sadder, Grachos' argument in favor of deaccessioning boils down to this: It was a mistake for the museum to ever acquire non-modern and non-contemporary works.

And as for why the A-K isn't selling all of its pre-modern work? "The curators have worked hard to maintain key objects that they felt were helpful in telling some stories," he says. "There's a cycladic figure and such that our curators like to refer to in terms of its relationship to early modernism, so we kept certain objects. There were objects we felt we could utilize in terms of education opportunities but that weren't central to the mission. So we didn't do a complete deaccessioning of everything that was not in the realm of modernist thought. We were also very conservative in that we wanted to [keep] our Hogarth or our David. These were artists who were starting to lead to something that came in the 19th century, and we could see the seeds of how thing swere starting to change through the collection."

Next: If the A-K spends $900,000 a year on contemporary art, isn't that enough?