Rent-A-Pic: Museums & Ethics

This past spring, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts rented out 21 Monets to a commercial art gallery operating inside a Las Vegas casino. On April 13, the casino lost power for three days, and the paintings may have been left baking in the desert heat while the juice was restored. Tough luck? You bet, and according to many in the museum world, a serious ethical lapse by the MFA as well. There are codes to which accredited museums and their directors must supposedly adhere, but according to AJ Blogger Tyler Green, those codes are frequently flouted, and rarely enforced. “Critics [have] warned about what might happen when a museum considered money-making to be more important than caring for and conserving art. When the electricity died at Bellagio, an academic debate was transformed into a real-life disaster.”