Collections and Deaccessioning in a Post-Pandemic World: Towards a New Reality

Towards a New Reality is about far more than the deaccessioning of museum and gallery collections. It's about how museums will be - must be - different after Covid-19. About a transformed environment, both social and financial, and museums' total response to it. In a changed and charged reality, deaccessioning is one element of a future in which issues of social justice, inequality, race, pay and decolonisation will impact collections as never before.

It is part of a major new 950-page resource which draws on the experience and thinking of some of the world's most experienced and respected museum and gallery professionals, with a Foreword by Melody Kanschat and Antoniette M Guglielmo of the Museum Leadership Institute.



The three volumes in the collection (available separately) are:

Conversations with Museum Directors Towards a New Reality Case Studies 

Contents include:

PARADIGM SHIFTS

1. Object Impermanence: Ethics, Endowments and Deaccessioning

2. Balancing the Needs of Today's Visitors Against Those of Future Generations

3. Optimizing Museum Asset Allocation

4. Understanding Disposal as an Ethical Crisis Response

5. Does the Museum Need a Single Wagon Wheel Without Provenance?

TRUTHS AND BELIEFS 

6. Deaccessioning and Disposal: A Registrar's Perspective

7. Bricks and Mortar Collections: Collecting, Assessing and Deaccessioning Buildings

8. The Illusory Public Trust in Art

9. Prioritizing the Public Domain in Deaccessioning

10. A Search for Direction: Finding Executive Leadership after a Deaccession Controversy

A GOOD THING 

11. Deaccessioning, Repatriation and a Global Reckoning 

12. Restitution, Social Justice and the Benin Bronzes 

13. Museums in the Time of Covid and BLM: Proactive Repatriation 

14. Reframing Disposals: Building Confidence in Transfers and Removals 

15. The Collection Ranking Project at Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields 

16. Repurposing: A Positive Result of Deaccessioning 



BEYOND DEACCESSIONING 

17. The Other End of the Telescope: Deaccessioning as a Public Good 

18. Collateralization: Financial Stability Without Deaccessioning 

19. Art Investment Collections: Considerations for Museums 

20. When Deaccessioning Isn't Enough: Closing the Museum 



PERSPECTIVES 

21. It's Not About Selling Art, It's About How You Use The Money 

22. The Case Against Deaccessioning Art to Support Operating and Capital Budgets

23. Progressive Deaccessioning

24. Where It Happens: The Perspective of a Museum Trustee 

25. Three Theses on Deaccessioning and Survival 

26. Deaccessioning and Protections for Objects and People: The Fair Museum Jobs Stance