Albright-Knox Poetics

Lee Rosenbaum, one of the blogosphere's more outspoken critics of museum deaccessions (like the Albright-Knox Art Gallery's 2006 decision to sell 200 antiquities and other pieces), will participate in a panel on this hot-button art world issue on March 11 in New York City.

A sample of her threatened song, posted on her daily blog CultureGrrl:

Don't send Bellows to Christie's maw,
Don't you send O'Keeffe to Arkansas,
Think what Albright-Knox went through,
And Eakins sales are hard to do.

All those references, save the Albright-Knox, have to do with major museum sell-offs in the last year or so, all of which have gained enormous attention in the national press.

As for the Albright-Knox, the unusually high windfall of nearly $70 million has meant that the passionate criticisms of last January have faded to below a whisper. And now, with plans for a new building underway, it seems irrelevant to many that the deaccession was ever an issue. But remember at the time how people were scared the Albright-Knox move would open the door for other art institutions to sell parts of their collections deemed "outside the mission statement?"

It seems, for better or worse -- and most say worse -- to be coming true.

--Colin Dabkowski

(Photo: Cleveland Museum of Art)