Museum professional codes have long held that deaccessioning, the permanent removal of a work from a museum's collection typically via sale, is acceptable only when proceeds are restricted to acquiring new works, never used to cover operating expenses, on the theory that a collection held for the public should not be liquidated to solve an institution's ordinary financial troubles. Defenders of this norm point to cautionary episodes in which museums sold masterworks to cover shortfalls only to find themselves, a decade later, both poorer in holdings and no better funded, the sale proceeds having been absorbed into general expenses that recurred the following year. Critics counter that the acquisitions-only restriction treats every museum's collection as equally essential to preserve intact, ignoring institutions whose storage vaults hold thousands of minor, rarely exhibited works whose sale would fund operations without depriving the public of anything it currently sees or is likely to see. The more defensible position may be narrower than either camp allows: the objection to funding operations through deaccessioning is best understood not as a categorical rule against ever doing so, but as a proxy for a harder question the rule conveniently avoids asking case by case, namely whether a given work's ongoing removal from public view constitutes a real loss to anyone.