Deaccession: What the Codes Actually Allow

Three codes converge on one sentence about money

Deaccession is not forbidden anywhere. Every professional code in the English-speaking museum world contemplates removing objects from a collection, and every serious collection has done it. What the codes control is the destination of the money. That single restriction is what separates a routine curatorial refinement from an institutional scandal, and it is the whole of the argument.

The American Alliance of Museums states the rule most bluntly. Its Code of Ethics for Museums, adopted in 1993 and amended in 2000, permits disposal through sale, trade or research activity solely to advance the museum's mission, and specifies that in no event may proceeds be used for anything other than acquisition or direct care of collections. Ten words in that clause carry the entire architecture of American museum finance: a collection is not a capital reserve.

The Museums Association in the United Kingdom reaches the same destination by a different route. Its Code of Ethics, revised at the association's annual general meeting on 5 November 2015, says museums should not undertake disposal for financial reasons except where doing so will significantly improve the long-term public benefit derived from the remaining collection. The wording was deliberately negotiated with Arts Council England and tested against earlier financially motivated disposals. At the meeting that adopted it, the association's director acknowledged that the formula had not yet been properly tested, and it has not been meaningfully tested since.

Direct care was the phrase that moved, and it moved twice

The most consequential change in deaccession policy this century happened in two steps, both at the Association of Art Museum Directors, and both are frequently misdescribed. On 15 April 2020, with museums closed by the pandemic, the AAMD board passed a resolution stating that it would refrain from censuring or sanctioning any museum, and from censuring, suspending or expelling any museum director, through 10 April 2022. Within that window, proceeds from deaccessioned works could support the direct care of the collection, provided the museum adopted a board-approved policy defining direct care and made that policy publicly available. The resolution did not amend the AAMD's professional practices. It suspended enforcement of them.

The second step made the change permanent and narrower. After a week of electronic voting concluding on 30 September 2022, AAMD members approved an amendment to Professional Practices in Art Museums allowing proceeds to fund direct care as well as acquisition. The definition adopted is deliberately tight: direct care means the direct costs associated with the storage or preservation of works of art. The amendment expressly excludes operations and capital expenses, and names two exclusions that had been the sticking points in 2020, staff salaries and costs incurred solely for temporary exhibition display. The revised professional practices were published on 19 December 2022.

The practical effect is smaller than the coverage suggested. A museum may now buy acid-free storage boxes and pay for a conservation treatment with deaccession money. It may not pay a registrar's salary, and it may not fund a show. The 2020 emergency, in which several institutions read direct care as covering collections staff wages, was closed off by the definition that followed it.

In America the sanction is loans, and loans are the currency

The AAMD cannot fine a museum or revoke a licence. Its enforcement mechanism is a request to its membership, and its membership is the group of institutions from which any serious loan exhibition must be assembled. On 18 June 2014 the association formally sanctioned the Delaware Art Museum for deaccessioning to pay outstanding debt and to build its operating endowment, asking its then 242 member directors to suspend loans of works of art to the museum and collaborations with it on exhibitions. The work sold was the museum's version of William Holman Hunt's Isabella and the Pot of Basil, which is now in the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Contemporary trade reporting described the result as falling well below Christie's expectations, and the figures that circulated conflated hammer with premium-inclusive total; a researcher wanting the sale price should take it from the auction house's own record rather than from the coverage.

The pattern repeated on 25 May 2018, when the AAMD sanctioned both the Berkshire Museum and the La Salle University Art Museum in the same statement, asking members to refrain from lending to or borrowing from either institution and from collaborating on exhibitions. The Berkshire Museum's programme, agreed in a settlement with the Massachusetts Attorney General, capped proceeds at 55 million dollars. Norman Rockwell's Shuffleton's Barbershop went to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art for around 29.3 million dollars, and Blacksmith Boy made 7 million at Sotheby's on 23 May 2018. The AAMD's stated objection was not the sale itself. It was that selling art to fund anything other than the collection breaks the relationship between museums, donors and the public.

In Britain the sanction is regulatory, and it bites harder

Northampton Borough Council sold the Egyptian statue of Sekhemka at auction in July 2014 for 15.8 million pounds, of which the council took around 8 million. Arts Council England removed Northampton Museum and Art Gallery and Abington Park Museum from the Accreditation scheme with effect from 1 August 2014 and excluded them for a minimum of five years, until at least August 2019. In October 2014 the Museums Association barred Northampton Museums Service from membership for the same minimum period, finding the sale a clear breach of its code.

Loss of Accreditation is a materially different penalty from loss of loans. Accreditation is the gateway to most public and lottery funding in the United Kingdom, to many charitable grants, and to the confidence of lenders. Arts Council England's acquisitions, exports and loans director framed the decision as a matter of upholding the standards that underpin the scheme; the Museums Association's president said the council had made a major mistake and that other local authorities needed to understand the consequences. The exclusion ran for the full minimum term, and that term is the measure of the deterrent.

The Sekhemka sale also produced the 2015 code revision. The wording about significant improvement to long-term public benefit exists because a local authority sold an antiquity it had been given, kept the money, and demonstrated that the previous formulation could not stop it.

Baltimore showed what a permission does not license

The clearest test of the 2020 resolution came six months after it passed. In October 2020 the Baltimore Museum of Art announced the sale, through Sotheby's, of Andy Warhol's The Last Supper of 1986 by private treaty at a projected 40 million dollars, Clyfford Still's 1957-G at an estimate of 12 to 18 million dollars, and Brice Marden's 3 of 1987 to 1988 at 10 to 15 million. The Still was the only work by the artist in the collection and had come directly from him as a gift in 1969; the Marden was the museum's only Marden.

The plan allocated 54.5 million dollars to an endowment covering collection care, research, conservation, documentation, exhibition, staff salaries and extended opening hours; 10 million dollars to acquisitions aimed at rebalancing the collection towards women artists and artists of colour; and 500,000 dollars to diversity, equity, accessibility and inclusion work. The museum halted the sale on 28 October 2020, less than four hours before the Still and the Marden were due on the block. The AAMD's president stated that the 2020 resolutions had not been put in place to incentivise deaccessioning. Two former board chairmen rescinded 50 million dollars in pledged gifts, and two artists resigned from the board.

Baltimore was not sanctioned, because it stopped. What the episode established is that the emergency permission of April 2020 was read by the profession as covering survival, not strategy, and that a museum's own donors enforce the norm faster and more expensively than any association can.