Here we go again. As I illustrate in my recent book on the history of deaccessions, the UK Museums Association cautiously opened the door in 2008 to a more relaxed posture towards deaccessioning through a circular entitled “Too Much Stuff?” The hope was that regional museums would react to the more permissive atmosphere by disposing of low-value, redundant works that were clogging up storage rooms and would unlikely ever be on display. On the contrary, several institutions took the occasion to jettison instead the most valuable masterpieces in their midst, to raise substantial funds for building repairs and other capital improvements wholly unrelated to collections care.

Unfortunately, the recent modest relaxation of the use of deaccessioning funds by the US Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), which now allows for the proceeds to be deployed for the “direct care” of collections for the next two years, has occasioned a similar onslaught of unbridled commodification by a few museums. The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), in particular, is uniquely egregious in this regard, and its sycophantic rationalisations to the press do not pass muster on further inspection and should not stand unchallenged.

Emboldened by the muted reaction to its recent sale of works by white male artists to raise funds for acquisitions of under-represented artists, the BMA is now proposing the sale of three major works to redirect funds to overcome “inequality” in staffing and salary levels. Christopher Bedford, the director, has mobilised these well-intentioned critiques of inequality at museums to justify a wholly unrelated looting of some of their most valuable works without a compelling and defensible curatorial rationale.

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