pulling down the temple -- breaking chains

Deaccession is in the air, all the rage, changing out the old art by old white guys and bringing in all minority, gender-specific, and underrepresented art, all above board and absolutely legitimate. Oh the standards might slip a bit but we haven’t been concerned about aesthetic quality for several generations and think of all the money, why we’ll all be rich. It’s being done for only the best reasons and now they can pay their starving-wage staffs, mostly unemployable art majors who manage the stacks and sweep the floors, and they can pave that parking lot and also acquire a few pieces of art by women and minorities, so neglected. 

Fact is they, any art museum, didn’t buy that forty million dollar artwork in the first place and now they’re trying to sell it. It was purchased at auction by some visionary philanthropist, so generous, who wrote it down on their tax form and deducted the price from the same tax pool we all pay into, leaving nothing but a paper chit for their fair share. Now alarms are sounding, the establishment courtiers have been aroused and the whole business of deaccession has been declared out of bounds, a betrayal of trust, and liable to blow the whole racket, ripping down the green curtain to reveal a bloated tax-evading parasite that’s been calling itself art.

If you want to see deacquisition hit overdrive rewrite the tax laws and watch all those heavy art lovers scurry back to their yachts and start pitching modern masters overboard, because the prices are going to tank. Consider the work of Mark Rothko with an easily recognized signature style and approximately a thousand examples of his work floating around. If anyone has a more accurate accounting let’s hear it. Anyway at about forty million a piece, a high of eighty-six million in 2012, that comes to 40,000,000,000 dollars worth of colored cloth poised to hit the market more or less all at once. It’s a disgrace and betrayal no doubt, but there are several points of view and there will be some who won’t mind when it happens. Pulling down the temple, don’t mind if I do.