i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

http://oberlin.edu/news-info/05sep/art.html

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Memorial_Art_Museum#Art_Rental

If you were to walk into a dorm room on the Oberlin College campus, there's a chance you might see an original Picasso or Goya work of art hanging on the wall next to a Bob Marley tapestry or Pink Floyd poster.  In these instances, it's unlikely that the student is some progeny of an incredibly successful art dealer or business mogul.  A more reasonable assumption is that the s/he has probably taken advantage of the college's art rental program.

Oberlin's Allen Memorial Art Museum has a collection of nearly 14,000 objects, but the museum's galleries are somewhat small. This means that a substantial percentage of the collection sits in storage most of the time.  Allen's curators want the student body to explore and appreciate the richness of its materials despite this limitation of space, so they added an additional layer to their organizing system (borrowed from libraries) that circumvents the problem.  

Every semester, the museum allows students to rent out one piece from a selection of 431 for a nominal fee.  These aren't the dregs of the Allen archives, though: in addition to Picasso and Goya, there are also works by Renoir, Dalí,  Warhol, and other extremely famous artists available. This may seem like a risky proposition, but in the sixty-odd years that they've run the program, Allen has never lost or repaired anything in the collection.   

In addition to increasing the exposure of the university's art collection, this system has the added benefit of removing the 'Mona Lisa' factor from the museum experience.  Instead of studying a Lichtenstein from behind a rope while overeager tourists snap flash pictures of the work, appreciators get to have it as a roommate for several months. This allows an up-close examination of the art, but there's also the long term exposure of getting to live with it day-in, day-out, in a comfortable setting, that can affect perception and interpretation.