Collection Reform

Museums approach this problem in different ways, and in recent years a handful of novel methods of displaying what might otherwise spend most of its life in climate-controlled storage have emerged. Some institutions have turned to the Internet. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has posted over 164,000 works on its website, far more than its galleries could ever hold. The Brooklyn Museum is going further still, cross-posting its digital assets into Wikimedia Commons. Still others, like the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, have asked artists and guest curators to cull through the unseen bits of the permanent collection to create new temporary exhibits.