ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways that artists introduce critical practice to advance ethical stewardship towards reconciliation between museums and communities. It shows how Robert Fontenot’s Recycle Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Ansuman Biswas’s Manchester Hermit probe contested issues in collections management, particularly the act of deaccession/disposal, to foster public discourse about what shared guardianship might look like in the twenty-first century. Acknowledging the relational aspects of ethical stewardship – those aspects that bind people together through objects – is a key strand of twenty-first-century museum ethics. Privileging experience as a relational device, binding people together through objects, opens up new directions for ethical care and sharing of heritage with diverse stakeholders. Most of the blog contributors clearly understood Biswas’s premise that ‘destruction’ was a trope to empower stakeholders to carry on civic dialogue on difficult stewardship issues. Like the Manchester Hermit project, the ‘Trees’ initiative is open-ended, with public stakeholders helping to determine the outcomes.
