An even bigger deaccessioning bombshell landed in late January: The trustees of Brandeis University, in Waltham, Massachusetts, decided to close the Rose Art Museum and sell the entire collection to pay the school’s operating costs. The Rose’s nearly 6,000-piece collection, which includes works by Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, is worth a reported $350 million to $400 million. The Rose sold off works to raise money for the Brandeis endowment before — in 1991, it put 11 Impressionist paintings on the block at Christie’s New York, for $3.65 million.

At press time, the Massachusetts attorney general’s office had just announced that it would begin reviewing the decision to determine whether Brandeis has violated the terms of any donations; many of the museum’s acquisitions were gifts.

Given the grim environment, could other struggling institutions follow? Although some may wish they could raid their holdings to generate operating funds, it’s unlikely that the 180-member AAMD will encounter any serious revolt against its decades-old restriction. "I simply cannot imagine we would ever back away from this requirement," says Dan Monroe, the chair of the association’s art issues committee and the director of the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Massachusetts. "It is so fundamental to the integrity of art museums. As soon as one starts treating the collection as a fungible asset, then the whole underpinning of support evaporates. Donors are not going to give works of art to museums with the notion in mind that next year they may turn around and sell them to pay their directors’ salaries."

Neal Benezra, the director of SFMOMA, agrees. He describes deaccessioning as "kind of the third rail of American museums" and states that "there have got to be other things that can be done first."

One such "thing" is to shift priorities. Huge capital projects, even those not involving new buildings, could be delayed or even canceled. "We don’t know where the bottom [of the recession] is," says Michael Conforti, the president of the AAMD and the director of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. "So we do not want to make any commitments, and that is true both in terms of building expansion and true of staff expansion." Conforti notes that museums contemplating new construction may hold off for a year: "Everybody who’s not already in the ground is looking at their building plans and schedules in a more realistic way. You can’t obligate your institution at a time of this level of uncertainty."

It’s unclear how the downturn will affect building projects that are in the preconstruction phase, such as the $125 million addition to the St. Louis Art Museum, by the hotshot London architect David Chipperfield, and the Renzo Piano-designed Whitney Museum of Modern Art, near the High Line in downtown Manhattan. Asked to comment on the status of the museum’s $680 million capital campaign, of which $435 million is allotted for construction of the Piano development, a Whitney spokesperson will say only, "We are still in the ‘quiet’ phase of fund-raising, so no one can answer these questions yet." Similarly discreet are the principals involved in the 75-story Jean Nouvel residence and hotel tower to be built next to the MoMA, in New York, that would give the museum an additional 50,000 square feet of gallery space. In 2007, MoMA sold the vacant parcel of land to Hines, the Texas-based real estate developer, for $125 million; after construction costs, MoMA estimates it will have $65 million left for its endowment. A Hines spokesperson, while asserting that the firm is pursuing the necessary approvals, refuses to say whether sufficient financing is in place.

Maxwell Anderson, of IMA, gives this advice to his fellow directors: "Take the medicine now. Be very careful about resources in the future, be very aggressive in pursuing contributive income, and don’t sell your soul trying to compromise your mission to make a quick buck. That will be the hair shirt you’ll wear when recovery begins."