Jess Castellote In June, when the International Council of Museums (ICOM) adopted its revised Code of Ethics, the headlines naturally went to the big, visible questions: restitution, decolonisation, and digital tech. But reading between the lines, what caught my eye was not the glamorous stuff. It was the everyday reality of lending and borrowing art. On paper, a loan seems straightforward: a collector or institution lends a work, the museum displays it for a period, and the work is eventually returned. In reality, loans are often where difficult decisions begin, even when the arrangement appears simple. At the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art (YSMA), we borrow regularly from collectors, from artists, and occasionally from other institutions. Almost every loan we have taken on carries an ethical question that never quite makes it into the loan agreement itself. The Code has plenty to say about lending and borrowing, but in the language of principle. Let me describe a few situations in which those principles become real decisions. I start with the most ordinary case. A collector lends us a work, generously and without conditions attached. We are grateful, the work goes into an exhibition, and everyone is pleased, at least for a while. But a museum cannot keep any single work on permanent display indefinitely. Walls are finite, themes rotate, and most of what any museum holds, whether owned or borrowed, spends far more time in storage than on a wall. So, the lender’s piece eventually goes into the store for a long stretch, brought out only occasionally. The lender, understandably, is unhappy. They lent the work to be seen, not kept safely out of sight. You can see it from both sides. The collector wants their piece seen, but the museum has to rotate what is on display on its walls. The problem usually begins much earlier: nobody spelled out, before the loan was agreed, what “showing the work” would really mean across a long period of time. A loan agreement that states plainly how often a piece is likely to be exhibited, for how long, and on what rotation, turns an unspoken assumption into something both sides have actually agreed on. It may not eliminate disappointment, but it does reduce the sense that expectations were never properly discussed. A subtler version of the same problem shows up in how a borrowed work gets shown rather than whether it is shown at all. A work’s presence in a museum tends to raise its standing, and sometimes its market value, whether anyone intends that effect or not. A lender rarely says, in so many words, that they expect prominent placement, generous wall text, or a credit line as conspicuous as the artist’s own. But the assumption is often there anyway, even if nobody says so. Trying to satisfy those expectations can compromise curatorial independence. Ignoring them can strain relationships with lenders and make future loans harder to secure. The best safeguard is to evaluate each work on curatorial grounds rather than on who owns it: would we place this work here, credit it this way, if it had come from someone with no further interest in how it was received? A related dilemma arrives less as a request and more as an offer. A collector proposes placing several works with us on long-term loan, sometimes years at a stretch, offered with the best intentions and potentially able to strengthen a young museum’s displays very quickly. It is incredibly hard to say no to that kind of generosity. But if we build a collection based only on what we are handed, rather than what we actively seek out, the museum loses its identity. We become a storage room for wealthy collectors, not a curated space. Most visitors will never distinguish between what YSMA owns outright and what is on long-term loan; a work’s presence on our walls reads as endorsement either way, regardless of the paperwork behind it. That means every unsolicited offer, however generous, deserves the same scrutiny we would give an acquisition: does this fit the museum’s collecting and exhibition priorities, or are we considering it mainly because it has been offered? Imagine an exhibition that depends on borrowing several important works from a single collector. Like most Nigerian museums, we don’t have the resources to cover an exhibition’s costs internally, and we rely on sponsors. The collector lending the work is, by definition, someone with means and an evident stake in the show’s success. Is it appropriate to ask them to help fund the exhibition as well as lend to it? A collector can reasonably support a museum through both loans and financial contributions. Plenty of serious patrons support institutions both with their objects and their money, and refusing that support purely because it comes from the same person would be an odd kind of caution. But timing is everything. If we turn around and ask a lender to fund the very show displaying her artwo
Don't miss out on breaking stories and in-depth articles.
