What types of objects does the Brooklyn Museum collect?
Since the Brooklyn Museum is an art museum – as opposed to a historical society, ethnographic museum, natural history museum, or museum of technology – assembling a comprehensive selection of objects of high aesthetic quality is the foremost consideration guiding acquisitions. Many additional factors might determine why an object is acquired. If an object was made in Brooklyn, retailed in Brooklyn, or owned by a prominent Brooklynite, for example, and meets our museum’s aesthetic criteria, it might be considered for acquisition. As collecting priorities, interests, scholarship, and current institutional values are redefined, museums not only acquire objects, but also regularly review their collections and deaccession works of art, or officially remove them from the collection, and then sell them at auction or transfer them to another institution.
