The New York Times has decided it's time to take on the D-word, a word so rife with scandal these days it's astounding that the venerable paper found it fit to print: deaccessioning.

What's truly intriguing about Robin Pogrebin's piece, "The Permanent Collection May Not Be So Permanent," which explores the practice of museums selling off works from their collection, is that she doesn't choose to highlight the small institutions like the National Academy Museum or the Rose Art Museum. No, it's not the recent hullabaloo surrounding these museums' contentious attempts to offload works to pay for their operating expenses — the cases that have made the issue a flash-point for controversy — that Pogrebin focuses on.

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Rather, the article turns to institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art — which largely deaccession works in accordance with the June 2010 policy on deaccessioning published by the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) — in the hopes, it seems, of bringing the D-word back into a lexicon of moral respectability.

"It's sometimes portrayed in the press as if we're trading houses, with objects going in and going out," Met director Thomas P. Campbell told the Times. "That's not the case. It's like a gardener pruning a tree over a long period of time. Deaccessioning is a healthy part of the management of any museum collection. We're not playing the market."

The AAMD defines deaccessioning as "the process by which a work of art or other object (collectively, a 'work'), wholly or in part, is permanently removed from a museum's collection" — but the details of how the institution is allowed to spend income from the sale and how transparent it must be are important. "Deaccession decisions must be made with great thoughtfulness, care, and prudence," the AAMD warns. "Expressions of donor intent should always be respected in deaccession decisions and the interests of the public, for whose benefit collections are maintained, must always be foremost in making deaccession decisions."

But when it comes to deaccessioning, "thoughtfulness, care, and prudence" can be expressed in vastly different ways. The Met, for instance, does not deaccession works given by a living donor if that living donor objects to the sale, the Times explains. MoMA, meanwhile, will not accept any art that comes with stipulations about future sales, as deaccessioning has played a major role in its collection-building since the days of Alfred H. Barr.

Current MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry has continued to build a metamorphic collection through deaccessioning, telling the Times that "many of the greatest works in our collection are the result of deaccessioning," including pieces by Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, and Vincent van Gogh, as well as Pablo Picasso's landmark "Demoiselles d'Avignon," which were purchased with money earned through the sales of other works.

According to the Times, it was only after the Metropolitan was investigated by the state attorney in the early '70s — regarding which works the museum had sold to acquire a major Velázquez painting — that the New York museum agreed to submit an annual report that lays out all deaccessions valued at more than $50,000, all of which must be publicly sold at auction after public notice has been given (if the work has been on view in the past 10 years).

Yet all of these prudent measures have certainly not curbed the Met's deaccessioning practices — the Times tells us that in the past three fiscal years the Met has sold works from its collection cumulatively valued at around $3.7 million. And the AAMD policy allows for this: "Deaccesssioning is a legitimate part of the formation and care of collections and, if practiced, should be done in order to refine and improve the quality and appropriateness of the collections, the better to serve the museum's mission."

Perhaps, when it comes right down to it, museums should be selling works — that are redundant, damaged, forged, too costly to care for, or just not a good fit for the collection — but for a reason the Times didn't even touch on. Maybe cultural institutions should take to heart the satirical suggestions of humorist Joe Queenan, who in a recent Wall Street Journal piece modestly proposed that museums start dumping some of their many artworks to boost public morale by funding lackluster local sports teams.

"If the major museums in New York City banded together and sold off a few minor artworks — sculpture, videos, whatever — they could give the Jets enough money to get themselves a pass rush and maybe even a field-goal kicker who doesn't make your heart stop every time he steps onto the field," Queenan argues. "Even Andy Warhol would be on board with that. He lived in New York. He died in New York. The Jets may have hastened his demise."

Unfortunately, it's too late to save Warhol, or the Jets. But you never know. Maybe Glenn Lowry is a Mets fan.