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Museums often stir controversy when they deaccession works - formally remove objects from permanent collections - with some critics accusing them of betraying civic virtue and the public trust. In fact, Martin Gammon argues in Deaccessioning and Its Discontents, deaccession has been an essential component of the museum experiment for centuries. Gammon offers the first critical history of deaccessioning by museums from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, and exposes the hyperbolic extremes of "deaccession denial" - the assumption that deaccession is always wrong - and "deaccession apology" - when museums attempt to blame the object for its removal - as symptoms of the same misunderstanding of the role of deaccessions to proper museum practice. He chronicles a series of deaccession events in Britain and the United States that range from the disastrous to the beneficial, and proposes a typology of principles to guide future deaccessions.

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Martin Gammon, formerly Managing Director of Museum Services in North America for Bonhams Auctioneers, is a founder of the Pergamon Art Group, which advises museums and private collections on bequests and collection management. He appears regularly as an appraiser on the PBS series Antiques Roadshow.

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