Relocation

Relocation is routinely confused with deaccession, and the difference matters: a relocated work is still the program's responsibility, keeps its accession number, and carries its record with it. Nothing leaves the collection. What changes is a single field, which is exactly why relocations go undocumented so often. A work that moved without its record being updated is functionally lost, even though nobody removed it from anything.

Site-specific work is where relocation gets contentious, because moving it can amount to destroying it. That was Richard Serra's argument about Tilted Arc, and it is why commissioning contracts now routinely spell out relocation terms in advance: who decides, what consultation the artist is owed, and whether moral rights have been waived for this scenario. Temporary relocations during construction need the same paperwork as permanent ones, since works put into storage "for a few months" are the ones most likely to never come back.