Do Museums Need Their Own Ethics Departments?

Yes, museums do have codes of ethics that cover the professional conducts of their staffs. Erich Hatala Matthes argues that that isn’t anough, as controversies from the fate of looted antiquities in collections to this summer’s outcries over Dana Schutz’s Open Casket at the Whitney Biennial and Sam Durant’s Scaffold at the Walker Art Center to the culture war over Confederate monuments demonstrate.