One of the quite crucial concerns must be the trusteeship and long-term
security of objects donated to a museum.  If donated objects (and other
collections) are simply part of the assets of a for-profit corporation or
company then they can be sold at any time either by the company itself or
by the liquidators in the event of insolvency. There were several
notorious cases of this in the 1980s.  For example, one British so-called
aviation museum which had received donations worth several hundreds of
thousands of dollars from - among others - the United States Air Force and
several international airlines turned out to be the private property of
the airport hotel company, and when the company was sold the whole
collection was auctioned off without any reference to the donors, who had
thought they were ensuring the permanent preservation of important
historic relics.

This case, and several others on both sides of the Atlantic, was very
damaging to the image of museums, not least in terms of their
trustworthiness, since no donor had ever been told that they were
were making gifts of their very valuable property to private interests.
Indeed, had government bodies - or even private companies - known this was
the case such action might well have been considered illegal at the time.
Instead, all involved had assumed that the very word "museum" meant that
such thins could not happen.

There have been similar problems with some corporate "art museums" -
especially in the Far East - which have turned out to be thinly disguised
covers for corporate art "investment", frequently with tax evasion as an
underlying motive.

I have no quarrel at all with e.g. corporate museums and collections,
providing they are properly constituted as separate trusts or foundations
within which the historic material is protected.


Patrick Boylan

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