Happy New Year!

And we are off to a running start here at the Museum of Culture and Environment collection's department! For the next 9.5 weeks, I have the help of five fantastic interns. Between the six of us, we will pack the collection and have it moved before the end of March. Which is approaching a bit too fast for my taste...

At the moment, we're doing finishing up things before getting down to the business of packing boxes. This has included dealing with some more of our mystery objects. Objects about which I know nothing and have been unable to find documentation for. Probably my favorite undocumented mystery is this piece:
Front:

Back:


I have no clue what this is or where it came from. It's a fairly heavy piece of carved stone with a very interesting image on it. It doesn't match the description of any of the pieces we haven't found yet - there are no missing "carved stone faces." And there's always the possibility that this was a student project mixed in with the collection we have that came from a teacher's museum. But what is it really? The world may never know. Or perhaps someone out there does...

Real and Fake

One thing that many museums deal with is the issue of reproductions in the collection.

For example: Yesterday I was going over an accession list for one of our collections (the list that was made of everything when it came into the museum). One of the items on the list was a bust by Desiderio da Settignano. I was skeptical. I doubted that we had a marble bust from an Italian Renaissance sculptor in the collection. But it's possible. Our collection, while small, is very diverse.

I hadn't encountered the object before, so I went to check on it. As I lifted it out of the back corner of the shelf it was on, I knew that it wasn't an original (it was far too light to be marble, and the inside was hollow); it was a plaster reproduction of A Little Boy.



Interestingly, none of the written documentation had indicated that this object was a reproduction. It was also mis-identified as a bust of the infant Christ. But a few minutes using google identified the original as residing in the National Gallery, and not being of an infant Christ, but an anonymous boy.

Now it's properly identified, and we have an issue in front of us: what do we do with this reproduction? It's not the real object, so it doesn't have the same intrinsic value (and I'm not referring to monetary value - the same would be true of a reproduction of a military uniform, or of a cereal box, for that matter) that the original would have. So do we keep it? If we don't keep it, what do we do with it?

I have my thoughts on this matter, but I'm going to keep them to myself. What do you think? How should museums handle reproductions (fakes) in their collections?