Exploiting a brief window of opportunity created to deal with fallout from the COVID-19 tragedy, Baltimore Museum of Art director Christopher Bedford recently announced liquidation of upwards of $73 million in important paintings from its permanent collection. 1/

Last spring, AAMD, the nat’l museum directors group, relaxed its restrictions on the use of art deaccession funds. The pandemic, still new & little understood, was exploding. Art museums were closing down, and the financial future of a plummeting economy looked bleak. 2/

The directors’ organization decided that, for a two-year period, some or all art deaccession income could be used for urgent collection care. Amid the ruin the BMA saw an opening – and took it. 3/

AAMD’s president & staff director said potentially dire financial need drove the relaxed restriction. BMA, though, is facing no fiscal cliff. “We are not financially desperate,” Bedford told the Baltimore Sun, which described the museum’s endowment as robust. 4/

The BMA deaccession is an outrageous money grab, hidden behind the mask of a deadly virus. 5/

For 40 years, ever since the Reagan era’s fetid dawn, we’ve built an increasingly unequal society on the lie that the market will solve all our problems – a lie that the Baltimore Museum of Art's sleazy deaccession maneuver still accepts /6

The BMA deaccession plan is obtuse. The art museum exists to support the collection, not the other way around /end

@KnightLAT Perhaps BMA should be reminded how well this went for the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis:

@KnightLAT Obviously, they don’t value that art or the artists. That would be like selling one of your children. Incomprehensible.

@KnightLAT Doesn’t this establishment have a history of shady art dealings?

@KnightLAT Another worrisome but different situation of a museum’s prizing building over collection is LACMA where Michel Govin’s hubris has a Zumthor amoebic structure costing over $750,000,000. with 20% less space for the collection and curvilinear, unfriendly walls for hanging art.

@KnightLAT I fear Govan will sell off the LACMA collection to fund Zumthor's monument to himself and the credulity of the LA County Supervisors.