When one walks through a major museum, one has the impression of viewing its collection. One is not viewing it. One is viewing a minuscule selection, and the remainder—the vast majority—is elsewhere: in climate-controlled storage, in numbered crates, on mesh racks where paintings hang on their edges like files in a cabinet. The Smithsonian, which curates approximately one hundred and fifty-five million objects, calculated that it displays less than one per cent. The Boijmans in Rotterdam acknowledged that in its historic building it could only display eight per cent of its one hundred and fifty-four thousand pieces. A round figure circulates suggesting that museums exhibit between five and ten per cent of their holdings; I have not found a solid source to support this as a universal rule, and I prefer not to repeat it. However, the data that are verified all point in the same direction: what is seen is merely the tip of the iceberg.

This is often recounted as a scandal. Museums that hoard, that conceal, that retain in the shadows what should be on display. There is some validity to the reproach, especially when the storage facility serves to avoid the necessity of deciding what is exhibited and what is not. However, I am interested in defending the contrary, as I believe that the storage facility performs a function that no gallery can, and which we almost never acknowledge.

In 1960, a portrait of a captain named Frederick Cornewall entered the National Maritime Museum in London. It had previously been attributed to Gainsborough, but upon entering the museum, it was downgraded to 'unknown British artist', and under that name, it passed into storage, where it remained for decades. In 2022, a Gainsborough specialist named Hugh Belsey was searching for a lost portrait and suspected it might be there. He requested to view it. He examined it. It was a Gainsborough. In March 2024, it was returned to public display for the first time in over thirty years.

Consider what made that outcome possible. It was not that the museum was correct: the museum was mistaken, and for sixty years. It was that the object continued to exist while the museum was mistaken. The storage facility neither succeeds nor fails; it simply preserves what the present cannot yet value, and keeps it available for a judgement that has yet to arrive. Had that painting been sold in 1960 as a minor work by an unknown author, or had it been discarded for lack of space, the correction of 2022 would have had nowhere to occur.

This is what I have just argued, in a more technical register, in the article I have published with Adolfo Cortés: that between the moment a work exists and the moment someone can publicly assert its value, there is an interval, and it is within that interval that revision, detected error, and belated rescue can occur. The photographs of Vivian Maier were able to reappear because the negatives existed: there was material support waiting for someone capable of examining it. A museum storage facility is precisely that on an industrial scale. A machine for preserving what we do not yet know how to interpret.

Some institutions have begun to make this visible, and the gesture strikes me as more significant than it appears. In 2021, the Boijmans opened a public depot where one may enter to view the entire reserve, organised not by schools or centuries, but by temperature and humidity requirements. That is to say: organised by what the objects require to endure, not by the narrative we construct around them. In 2025, the V&A opened a visitable storage facility in London containing half a million pieces where anyone may request that a specific object be retrieved for close inspection, free of charge. These are not exhibitions. They are the back-of-house presented without artifice, and in that lack of narrative lies an honesty that galleries do not always possess.

Now for the reverse, as without it this would be naive. Storage costs money, and significant amounts: square footage, stable climate, insurance, personnel, inventory. A storage facility is a permanent financial obligation in exchange for a benefit that may never arrive. Hence the constant pressure to sell holdings, the deaccessioning, which in recent years has resulted in notable episodes: a Baltimore museum that halted a multi-million-pound sale two hours before the auction began, an Indiana university authorised by a judge to sell a Georgia O’Keeffe painting to renovate student residences. Industry standards attempt to set a limit—monetary value should never be the motive for a sale, and the proceeds should be reinvested into the collection—but the limit is strained every time a budget is tightened.

And there lies the point I wished to make. Each time a storage facility is emptied, the interval is curtailed. It is not merely an object that is lost: it is the possibility that someone, sixty years hence, might seek something we do not yet know is there. A museum is not solely what it displays. It is also, and perhaps above all, what it continues to hold while it remains unaware of its contents. The gallery exhibits what we have already decided upon; the storage facility sustains what we might yet discover. And this second function, which neither sells tickets nor appears in photographs, is what allows the museum to err without that error becoming definitive.

On open conversation

This text expands upon a thesis I maintain in the research on recognition that I share with Adolfo Cortés García: that the decisive factor is not that a work be recognised, but that there exists an interval in which that recognition may be revised. The archive and the storage facility are, in this sense, critical infrastructures rather than mere repositories. If anyone wishes to intervene from the perspectives of museology, conservation, collection management, or cultural policy, this notebook remains open.

Sources

Smithsonian Institution. Smithsonian Institution Fact Sheet, 1 August 2018 (collections and percentage on display).

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Institutional information regarding the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen (opened 5 November 2021) and the collection.

Victoria and Albert Museum. V&A East Storehouse (opened to the public, 31 May 2025) and 'Order an Object' service.

Royal Museums Greenwich. Captain Frederick Cornewall, Thomas Gainsborough: reattribution (2022) and return to display (March 2024).

ICOM. Guidelines on Deaccessioning.

Association of Art Museum Directors. Amendment to the guidelines on the use of proceeds from deaccessioning, 30 September 2022.

ICCROM-UNESCO. International survey on collection storage (2011). Note: the 90% figure in storage circulates following the dissemination of this survey; it does not originate literally from the report.

Cortés García, Adolfo, and Juan A. Esteban Ruiz. Recognition and Surplus. Zenodo, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21630455