Guest Speech｜Maxwell L. Anderson, former President of the Association of Art Museum Directors
Date：2022-06-08
Speech by Maxwell L. Anderson, former President of the Association of Art Museum Directors
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Many art world observers encourage museums to liberate artworks from storage, where, in American museums at least, over 95% of collections are kept. While the circulation of antiquities can have positive results, it is also expensive, time-consuming, and distracting from the other multiple obligations of museum personnel. Which is not to say that circulating works is not a good idea, simply that each potential loan has to be reviewed on a case- by-case basis. Museum directors overseeing significant collections find themselves forced to decline the majority of loan requests, for various reasons. The intellectual premise of a loan exhibition may be felt to be of negligible research value, or the presumed display conditions might invite outright physical risk to the object and its lending institution. The works requested for loan may be judged too integral to the museum’s identity and current displays to be away from view for several months. Or the would-be lender lacks the resources necessary to prepare the works for display, travel, and publication.
In my experience, objects are no more likely to be damaged when in circulation than when back home at their museum. Michelangelo’s marble statue group the Pietà famously traveled to the 1964 New York World’s Fair without incident, only to be vandalized back at the Vatican eight years later. Antiquities slated for display are routinely accorded special treatment in advance, and that can include the possible discovery of ‘inherent vice’ such as infestation or ‘bronze disease’ that can be interrupted and addressed. Other potential benefits can result from reintegration of old damages, consolidation of the object’s surface, and new mounts that are more stable and trustworthy than their original mounts. The careful handling of works slated for display rarely results in damage while packing, and the technology of crating and shipping artworks has greatly improved over the last generation, to the point that the chances of misfortune are minimal.
By contrast, objects that are not accorded the attention of works in circulation may suffer in silence, unseen on the back of a shelf, with corrosion triggered by excessive humidity, staining from leaky pipes above, animal droppings saturating their surface, or any of a number of other threats familiar to people with heirlooms long neglected in attics and basements.
Many museums with significant stored collections are amenable to extending long-term loans. These can be extensive, with dozens or more works spending several years at smaller museums. The presumed value of such loans is obvious: these tend to be objects that would otherwise remain in storage, but are instead made available to a broad public in a location or institution unable to provide access to relevant examples of cultural heritage. The costs attendant to long-term loans are absorbed over years instead of weeks, and benefits to the borrowing institution are incalculable, starting with the implied savings of not needing to purchase comparable works were they available on the legal market— an increasingly unlikely scenario in any event.
Long-term loans demand a great deal from both lending and borrowing institutions, beginning with mutual trust, a perceived benefit to both museums, and the costs of preparing, packing, shipping, installing, and offering educational programs and publications connected with them. The numbers of such loans are accordingly finite, even for the largest of institutional lenders, and demand continuous vigilance from both lender and borrower, as well as increased insurance, security, and management costs. That said, they can be transformative for the borrowing institution, and typically yield new research on works that might otherwise remain out of circulation. There is no organized reward to encourage such loans, and therefore they tend to be arranged as a function of an entrepreneurial director at the borrowing end, and an open-minded director at the lending end. With so much of the world’s cultural heritage in storage, and a sharp decline in the number of antiquities available for sale in the legal market, long- term loans could become the best way for both archaeological and collecting institutions to share both the burden and the gift of caring for our collective heritage.
