How to Manage Public Artworks? A Market Alternative to Deaccessioning

The case of Italy—that is representative of a global trend—highlights how a large part of movable cultural heritage is hidden in public museums’ warehouses and not even properly recorded. The legal framework, especially in Civil law countries, limits the scope for privatization as part of the optimal management of cultural assets. We propose a tradable long-term concession on movable artworks to enhance the incentives of selected private operators to invest in artworks’ extraction from public museums’ warehouses (i.e., inventory, exploitation, etc.). For fiscally constrained countries, the social and monetary values that derive from public cultural heritage increase compared to traditional exploitation schemes.