When Museums Let Go: The Hidden Costs and Quiet Debates Behind Selling Permanent Collections

There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a gallery when a work disappears from its familiar wall. No announcement, no ceremony—just a rectangular patch of slightly brighter paint where a canvas once hung for decades. For many museum professionals, that absence speaks louder than any press release. It is the silence of deaccessioning: the formal, often agonizing process by which a museum removes a work from its permanent collection, sometimes selling it to private buyers, sometimes transferring it to another institution, and sometimes—controversially—liquidating it to cover operating costs.

In recent years, that silence has grown considerably louder.

A Practice as Old as Museums Themselves—But Newly Charged

Deaccessioning is not new. Museums have quietly refined, redirected, and occasionally sold portions of their collections for well over a century. What has changed is the scale, the visibility, and the stakes. The financial devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated decisions that had been deferred for years, and several high-profile cases—most notably the Brooklyn Museum's sale of works through Christie's and the Everson Museum of Art's disposal of a Pollock to fund diversity initiatives—thrust the practice into uncomfortable public scrutiny.

"The word itself sounds clinical, almost bureaucratic," says one mid-career curator at a regional American art museum who asked not to be identified by name. "But every deaccession is a decision about what a museum believes it exists to do. And those decisions are rarely as clean as the policy language makes them sound."

The Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), the professional body that sets ethical standards for the field, has long maintained that proceeds from deaccessioned works should be used only to acquire new works for the collection—never to cover operational expenses such as staff salaries, building maintenance, or programming costs. That guardrail, many curators argue, is the only thing standing between responsible collection stewardship and institutional self-cannibalization.

The Pandemic Exception That Became a Precedent

In May 2020, as museums shuttered nationwide and revenue collapsed, the AAMD made a significant—and, to some, alarming—concession. It temporarily relaxed its guidelines, permitting member institutions to use deaccession funds for direct care of collections, a category broad enough to be interpreted generously. The measure was framed as emergency relief. Critics worried it would normalize a practice that had previously been considered a last resort.

Those concerns were not unfounded. "Once you've crossed that line, even temporarily, it becomes harder to argue it should never be crossed again," reflects a curator at a Midwestern encyclopedic museum. "The institutional memory is short. The financial pressures are not."

The Baltimore Museum of Art drew particular attention when it announced plans in 2020 to sell works by Andy Warhol, Clyfford Still, and Brice Marden—all by living or recently deceased artists with strong market values—to fund equity and staff compensation initiatives. The backlash from the art world was swift and pointed, and the sales were ultimately paused. But the episode laid bare a tension that many institutions quietly navigate every day: the conflict between financial survival and the public trust embedded in a permanent collection.

What "Permanent" Actually Means

The word permanent in "permanent collection" has always been somewhat aspirational. Works enter collections through purchase, donation, and bequest, and they leave through loss, deterioration, transfer, and, yes, sale. But the concept carries moral weight that transcends legal technicality. Donors give works to museums with the reasonable expectation that those objects will be preserved for future generations, not converted into operating capital when budgets tighten.

"When a donor gives a work, they're entering into an implicit covenant with the institution and with the public," explains a curator with experience in collections management at a major East Coast museum. "Deaccessioning for direct care can honor that covenant. Deaccessioning to pay the electric bill does not."

The distinction matters enormously in practice. Selling a redundant work—one of three similar pieces by the same artist, for instance—to fund the acquisition of something that genuinely strengthens the collection is widely regarded as responsible stewardship. Selling a signature work to bridge a budget gap is viewed by most curators as a betrayal of the institution's foundational purpose.

The Equity Argument: A Complicating Factor

In recent years, a new and more philosophically complex rationale has entered the deaccessioning conversation. Some institutions have argued that selling works by historically overrepresented artists—white, Western, male—to fund acquisitions by underrepresented artists represents not a compromise of mission, but a fulfillment of it. The argument is not without merit, and it has found genuine support among curators committed to diversifying collections that were built under conditions of systemic exclusion.

But the counterargument is equally compelling. "You can't correct historical inequity by creating new ones," cautions one curator who works extensively with collections of American folk art. "If the standard for what gets sold is 'we have too many of these,' that's a collection decision. If the standard is 'this work has a strong market value right now,' that's a financial decision dressed up as an ethical one. Those are very different things."

The line between principled collection refinement and opportunistic liquidation is, in practice, frequently blurred—and curators are often the ones left to navigate it without adequate institutional support.

Where Curators Draw the Line

For all the institutional variation in policy and practice, certain principles recur in conversations with curators across the country. Most draw a clear distinction between deaccessioning as a collection-building tool and deaccessioning as a financial instrument. Most express deep discomfort with sales that prioritize market value over cultural significance. And nearly all emphasize that transparency—with donors, with the public, and with the broader museum community—is non-negotiable.

"The public has a right to know what their cultural institutions are doing with the works held in trust for them," says a curator at a public art museum in the Southeast. "Deaccessioning in secret, or with minimal disclosure, is how you erode the trust that makes museums possible in the first place."

That trust, once eroded, is extraordinarily difficult to rebuild. Museums that have faced public backlash over controversial sales have found that the reputational damage can outlast the financial relief the sales were meant to provide.

The Question That Won't Go Away

As American museums continue to wrestle with structural funding challenges, aging infrastructure, and the imperative to serve broader and more diverse audiences, deaccessioning will remain a live and uncomfortable question. The curators who navigate it are not villains or heroes—they are professionals caught between institutional necessity and professional ethics, doing their best to honor obligations that sometimes pull in opposite directions.

What the debate ultimately reveals is something important about the nature of museums themselves: they are not warehouses, nor are they investment portfolios. They are, at their best, institutions of public trust, built on the conviction that certain objects belong to all of us—and that the decision to let them go is never, truly, a simple one.

Ask A Curator spoke with multiple museum professionals for this article. Several requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of ongoing institutional discussions.