One problem with storing it all in one basement is what if the basement burns or catches fire? All gone.

Distributing it widely means enormously lowering the risk of it all being lost.

It's not as if all art exists in one basement. There are over 1,500 art museums in the US alone, not accounting for all of the art stored in galleries, public buildings, and in private collections. If one particularly large node--say MoMA--burnt down, that would be a huge blow, but it would not destroy the world's art archive by any means.

Ironically, distributing art widely via the private market leads to way more lost art. A painting living in the AIC's basement means there's an entire team dedicated to preserving it, and a system for accessing it should you want to see it. A painting living in the basement of an anonymous investor who bought it off-the-record from someone who themselves bought it anonymously at auction may never resurface (incidentally, this scenario describes the state of quite a bit of classic art).

> Distributing it widely means enormously lowering the risk of it all being lost.

You may not have intended it, but that sounds like loose statistical language meant to misguide the reader. Yes the probability that ALL is lost is lower when works are distributed, so your statement is correct. But what actually matters is the expected total value of the works successfully preserved over time under each methodology.

I’d bet on libraries, specifically top tier institutional libraries, where they have whole preservation departments for whom disaster planning is a key responsibility.

The professional archivists stored all the unpublished Kennedy pictures in a vault in the bottom of the World Trade Center. Perfectly safe there. No need to make copies.

Whilst it emphasises that loss is still a factor, I don't feel your anecdote counters the position of the parent comment at all.

Arguably, if that art was in the hands of private individuals then it would at least get some use; if it's filed away in museums basement then it effectively belongs to nobody, since neither the public nor the potential private buyers can enjoy it.

I think a lot of people on this thread are getting the wrong idea of how art archiving works, which is understandable, as the art world is pretty opaque at the best of times.

Being stored in a museum's basement is not a terminal state. Beside the growing effort to digitize collections (like this one), new curators design new exhibits based on their archive--and the archives of other museums who are willing to loan pieces--all the time. The archives are also typically accessible on request, though this is mostly done by researchers/students.

Being stored in the archive simply means there is a team of people dedicated to caring for a piece until there is someone asks to see it. This system isn't perfect, and some museums are better than others about access, but it is far from the "buried forever" scenario that many seem to be imagining.

In fact, the "lost forever" scenario is far more common on the private market, where art is bought as an investment in which the owner is actually incentivized to restrict access. Due to the complexities of international trade, there is a huge amount of "lost" art sitting in some anonymous buyer's vault that may or may not ever resurface. To be clear, I have no problem with the private ownership of art, it's just more often the cause of the problem being discussed here (inaccessibility) than it is a solution.