How to Manage Public Artworks? A Market Alternative to Deaccessioning

Abstract

The large and growing size of cultural heritage poses formidable fiscal and management challenges to governments in several countries. In turn, a large part of movable cultural heritage is hidden, since it lies in warehouses of public museums and, in many cases, is not even properly recorded. Deaccessioning of public artworks and public-private partnerships have often been considered possible solutions to enhance governments efforts to increase, protect, display and manage cultural heritage. Established legal frameworks severely limit the scope for privatization of public artworks and, thus, the optimal asset management of cultural property. To overcome such a limitation, we propose a “tradable” long-term concession on movable public artworks which may enhance the incentive of “selected” private operators (e.g., art investment vehicles) to invest in costly activities, such as “digging” in warehouses and providing a high-quality digital inventory of artworks, which in turn would raise both the social and the monetary values that can be extracted by public artworks exploitation.