Museums of the USA were allowed to sell paintings from the collections of the
ARTinvestment.RU   01 мая 2020

This should help museums to cope with the financial losses they incur from-за quarantine

In a crisis, when one after another news about what museums for the quarantine period to lose millions and tens of millions of dollars, Association of art Museum Directors (AAMD) allowed to museums to use the money they receive from the state or as donations for household needs.

moreover, in the case of extreme necessity for the amendment of its financial position now have official permission to sell works of art stored in their permanent collection.

I must say that the practice of selling works from the Museum collections is not new: in the world are sold annually about 100 thousand exhibits. Until recently, however, the money went for the purchase of new exhibits, meetings or museums were just exchanging works, as agreed in advance: usually, this takes the form of two separate sales and carried out without much attention. Among the most high-profile of such transactions, became the property of the media, — selling in 2011, the Museum of fine arts, Boston eight works from its permanent collection to raise the money needed to buy the paintings of Gustave Caillebotte's "Man at bath". Among the paintings exhibited then at the auction, was the work of Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro and Pierre-Огюста Renoir. But such cases were rather of a private phenomenon, which required special permission and justification, which explained why the removal of these works from the Museum holdings will not cause irreparable damage to the significance of the collection.

Now the main rationale for the sale may be the financial needs of the Museum, not related to the replenishment of the Fund. And here we are faced with several problems of logical, logistical, and reputational sense.

In-первых to sell the work at auction at the highest price possible, the Museum needs to strongly emphasize its importance and quality. Here, the Museum is faced with a choice: either to confirm that the best paintings from his collection go under the hammer, or to inform the potential buyer of this work that it is at best average and that the Museum does not lose anything by selling it.

In-вторых, the idea of selling works from the Museum funds to cover the huge losses allegedly based on the very high cost of these paintings. However, a considerable part of the high prices — for example, quality (Museum quality) of the Impressionists — due to their relative rarity on the market, and if museums are beginning to sell them, the price will fall.

And-третьих thinking about amounts of income that can bring art-институциям treasure for years stored in the funds, few people think about the costs related to the sale. They include the cost of examination and insurance, obtaining permission to sell the subject from the donor, and determining the legal status of the subject, the payment of sales tax and percentage of sales to the author's heirs (if required), logistics, etc. the above steps require a lot of time and effort, and the total expenditure on them can be a considerable share of the sale amount.

the Idea of more free sales of items from Museum collections are quite interesting and can, with proper asset management, to diversify and brush up on art-рынок, but can this way of replenishment of the budgets to promote development of museums and art-рынка — the big question.

the Material was prepared by Maria Kuznetsova, AI

Source: washingtonpost.com