The degrowth of museums... and collections?

Pottery shards found during excavations
Photo : Jacques Dassié (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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The number seemed incredible: in 2022, "more than 200,000 new items" would have entered French public collections. This figure was quoted by Christelle Creff, director of the French museums department, at a study day organised by ICOM France on the "degrowth" of museums, analysed here by Bénédicte Bonnet Saint-Georges. The head of the museums department therefore concluded that in the coming years we would certainly have to reflect on the subject of the inalienability and imprescriptibility of public collections [1]. Because all these objects take up space, and some curators, as we saw during the day, clearly seem to think that the artworks mean a lot of work.

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