Not to be an originalist, but the ‘Musaeum’ (home or institution of the muses) we get our modern and contemporary sense of a ‘museum’ did not include physical art works. It was for blankly archiving poetry and music. They trafficked in files with no Benjaminian auratic concern.

This is why burning the library of Alexandria depleted cultural knowledge; it was perhaps the first and most devastating instance of data loss grief

Is the museum a database? No. It’s archives are a database, but we’re better at (and make far more) archives now, so removing a purely evidentiary, textual entry from one doesn’t deplete human knowledge an iota.

Art works are a new entry into this equation and some people seem to think museums are duty-bound to hold these acquisitions fast and never release them.

Frankly, the job of the Library of Alexandria has been well performed by the museum by the time an object enters its collection

It is inconceivably rare that a deaccessioned object with massive market value would simply disappear from availability for future view. No collector with pockets that deep doesn’t want to lend their work to a museum for a show.

And not all objects are of equal critical value. Many, many things are worth more money to a collector than they are worth the complicated ongoing task of enculturating a museum’s public.

The problem of museums not actually being databases is that they don’t have everything.

If museums want their collection—and therefore programming—to incrementally become less white, male and European, then their problem is easy: just don’t get anything from anyone else like that for hundreds of years.

Of course that is ridiculous. Lesser works by certain artist (works perhaps more exciting to collectors than to either critics or viewers) could fund an expanded ambit of a museum’s collection including more people less white or male who nonetheless will remain majority holdings.

But this is only half of the possibilities, and it’s by half the less important part: Museum workers (janitors, docents, art handlers) don’t make a fraction of what curators or directors do and that is manifestly wrong. Anyone who says otherwise has too much money.

Ear marking the sale of 3 unremarkable but monetarily valuable works to raise the salaries of janitors while also acquiring works that expand and complicate a necessarily incomplete collection curated to educate the public has no drawbacks. Anyone who says otherwise is scum.

Even if it were possible that this sale would constitute a loss, which I hope this thread will convince you otherwise of, it would unquestionably be worth the lives of the people who could live a better life working for a more diversely constituted museum collection.