Culture Chronicle

Bill to Halt Certain Sales of Artwork May Be Dead
The New York Times - August 10, 2010
By Robin Pogrebin

A bill to prohibit cultural institutions from selling pieces from their collections to cover operating costs has all but died in the New York State Legislature, in the face of opposition from major cultural institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the withdrawal of support from the bill's Senate sponsor. "It looks like it is lost for this session and for the foreseeable future," said Michael Botwinick, director of the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, who worked on the bill as a board member of the Museum Association of New York.

Some museums are already precluded from such sales by the state Board of Regents, but the bill would have made the practice illegal and expanded the prohibition to all museums.

"The problem is, we'll have a two-tiered system," said Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, who led the drafting of the bill and is running for attorney general.

Though museums sell artworks all the time, they generally direct the proceeds toward acquiring other works of art. Many in the museum world have deemed selling -- or deaccessioning -- artworks to pay expenses a misuse of funds that jeopardizes preserving cultural heritage as a public trust.

But some museums that would have been affected by the bill argued that it was overly broad and confining and that they were fully capable of governing themselves.

A spokesman for the Met called the legislation "impractical, unworkable and unneeded," and the Met's director, Thomas P. Campbell, wrote in an e-mail, "While we respect efforts to bring clarity to the deaccessioning process, we believe the Metropolitan Museum has maintained a scrupulously transparent process for more than three decades -- tightly governed by its trustees, subject to review by the State Attorney General, and requiring that funds from deaccessioning be used only for the purpose of acquiring other works of art." For the full article, click here