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.
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.