Deaccession roulette.

The word deaccession is one of those bureaucratic coinages whose chief purpose is verbal obfuscation. If a museum director tells you he has "deaccessioned" eighteen Cezannes, you think for a second, "Oh, that's nice" while you wonder exactly how to conjugate the verb "to deaccess." What would happen if museum directors were more direct? Suppose, for example, that instead of saying "I have deaccessioned eighteen Cezannes" he spoke in plain English and said: "I have looted my collection of eighteen Cezannes in order to sell them and raise money to cover the budget shortfall I created by imprudent management." It sounds rather different, doesn't it?

As far as I have been able to discover, we have no reliable figures on the number of paintings and other types of cultural property that have been lost to the public as a result of "deaccessing" works. The practice is not illegal, but it is often suspect or even shady, especially when the transaction relies--as it often does--on a high degree of secrecy and speed in order to lower the risk of public intervention.

Of course, there are sometimes legitimate grounds for an institution's disposing of the property which it was entrusted to preserve. A bequest that clearly fell outside an institution's scholarly or aesthetic purview, for instance, might rightly be sold. But the issue is not those marginal cases--in the nature of things, they are infrequent--but rather the habit of treating the collection over which one presides as a sort of financial larder to be raided whenever times are tough. After all, museums, libraries, and other such cultural institutions are tax-exempt entities because they serve the public. Their collections are held in trust for posterity.

The practice of reckless deaccessioning seems to have gotten a big boost in the 1970s when Thomas Hoving, then director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, routinely sold important works in order to finance his habits of acquisition. Douanier Rousseau's important painting Tropics, for example, was just one of the Met's treasures that Hoving, with great secrecy, sold in order to acquire a couple of expensive paintings.

The Met was not alone. In 1990, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum auctioned a cartload of works by Kandinsky, Modigliani, and other modern masters in order to buy ... the Panza di Biuma collection of minimal and conceptual art. In 2000, the Museum of Modern Art, desperate to raise money for one of its interminable expansions, sold Picasso's Man with ...