Effects of The Late-2000s Financial Crisis On Museums

Effects Of The Late-2000s Financial Crisis On Museums

Art museums in the United States and the United Kingdom have been hit especially hard by the 2008–2012 global recession. Dwindling endowments from wealthy patrons forced some museums to make difficult and controversial decisions to deaccession artwork from their collections to gain funds, or in the case of the Rose Art Museum, to close the institution and sell the entire collection.

Such actions have prompted censure from Museum organizations such as the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council in the UK and the Association of Art Museum Directors in the US. These organizations charge that the actions of their members were in violation of not only their ethics code but also the core of their mission- to provide access to a fund of cultural heritage for future scholarship- by selling works to private buyers for purposes other than funding new acquisitions. Consideration of the dire financial state of these institutions, and the intensifying effect that any punitive action by an ethics organization will have on the finances of an individual museum, has fostered debate on the merits of deaccessioning.

Read more about Effects Of The Late-2000s Financial Crisis On Museums:  Background, The National Academy of Design, Bailout of MOCA, Rose Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, In The UK

Famous quotes containing the words effects of, effects, financial, crisis and/or museums:

    Each of us, even the lowliest and most insignificant among us, was uprooted from his innermost existence by the almost constant volcanic upheavals visited upon our European soil and, as one of countless human beings, I can’t claim any special place for myself except that, as an Austrian, a Jew, writer, humanist and pacifist, I have always been precisely in those places where the effects of the thrusts were most violent.
    Stefan Zweig (18811942)

    Let us learn to live coarsely, dress plainly, and lie hard. The least habit of dominion over the palate has certain good effects not easily estimated.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    In full view of his television audience, he preached a new religion—or a new form of Christianity—based on faith in financial miracles and in a Heaven here on earth with a water slide and luxury hotels. It was a religion of celebrity and showmanship and fun, which made a mockery of all puritanical standards and all canons of good taste. Its standard was excess, and its doctrines were tolerance and freedom from accountability.
    New Yorker (April 23, 1990)

    It is necessary to turn political crisis into armed crisis by performing violent actions that will force those in power to transform the military situation into a political situation. That will alienate the masses, who, from then on, will revolt against the army and the police and blame them for this state of things.
    Carlos Marighella (d. 1969)

    Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters.... We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things.
    Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)