Museums serve the public right?

The Guggenheim has auctioned off stuff practically directly from their gallery.

Powhida talks ethics and morals.

Hashtag class has just finished its run.

We seem to be fighting with what art is and should function in terms of ethic or morals. Sure. But I believe that these three have a subtext about the non-profit and its assumption of non-profitness.

Let's review. The non-profit art space is granted that legal status why? It serves the public by being a location of reference. It becomes a location where we store our physical goods that are deemed to be influential and of note. Like the news paper of yesteryear being the paper-of-record, the museum serves a similar function. We ask that the non-profit museum acts in our interests, or at least pretends to act in our interest.

The question of how the museum is or isn't a public institution is the question at hand. It has to be profitable and raise insane amounts of money yearly. One part of the Museum's job is collecting the work, the collectors, the scholars, the curators, the staff into one place to make the museum function as a public institution. But the museum's morals and ethics are often stretched by this basic job.

Gathering the coffee sales people is not usually a decision fraught with ethics, but an artist acting as curator, who has been collected by a board member who is a major benefactor to the institution is. Selling art from a show should bring up red flags. The questions raised by Brandeis with the Rose is a similar situation. Does the non-profit status of the art museum allow for gathering of property that will be sold off at an opportune time? Not at all by most people's estimation. One cannot start a collection, say it's in the public's interest and then just change your mind that it was actually a liquid collection that will be up for sale to the highest bidder.

So, instead of going all Andrea Fraser and critiquing the museum through our art, we seem to be talking about this in public via words?! Amazing. We might be growing up yet. One thing I hope is that as people like Powhida are smart competent thinkers, I hope that the opportunity to self-publish constantly, and without much editorial challenge won't keep them from working these ideas out completely and writing what would be a fascinating book about this subject. 140 characters, no matter how often, does not allow for full thoughts.