Provenance and Acquisitions Policy
The MME publishes this policy as a public commitment. It is written to be read by the artists and communities the museum works with, by the institutions it works alongside, and by anyone who wants to know how a museum of the global history of mosaic can be built without repeating the practices that filled the world’s encyclopedic collections.
The governing ethic
The MME builds the global history of mosaic on one principle that settles, in a single move, the questions of provenance, restitution, and the colonial inheritance of the encyclopedic museum: the MME pays for what it uses — to the living maker, or to the living community that holds a tradition — and it never moves an original. Everything below follows from that sentence.
A museum of the history of mosaic could, in the ordinary way, buy old objects on the market and lift ancient floors into its galleries. The MME does neither. It collects the work of living artists, and it presents historical mosaic through rights-cleared reproduction, leaving every original where it stands. This is at once a preservation stance, an anti-colonial stance, and a market-building stance, and the museum chooses it deliberately over the conventional model because it serves the field better than acquisition ever could.
What the MME collects: living artists, originals, paid at or above published rates
The MME acquires original work only from living artists. For a history museum this is deliberately unusual, and it is the heart of the policy. Collecting contemporary work moves money to the artists who make it rather than to dealers and estates, it advances the field while the field is still being made, and it builds the documented market record that mosaic has never had. An institution that collects the living does more for the art form than one that competes for the same finite pool of historical objects.
An artist is “living” for the purpose of acquisition at the point the MME agrees to acquire or commission the work. There is no acquisition of an artist’s work after their death: the museum does not buy from estates, dealers, or the secondary market. Works already in the collection remain in the collection after an artist dies; the collection simply grows only through direct relationship with living makers, by commission and by purchase from the artist.
Published rates are a floor, never a ceiling. The MME pays at documented, published rates as a minimum beneath which it will not go. Artists may command more, and the museum meets or exceeds the standard; it never negotiates an artist down. Every acquisition and commission agreement also carries the artist’s resale right. That right is statutory in Spain and across the European Union under Directive 2001/84/EC, transposed in Spain’s consolidated intellectual-property law: it applies to resales at or above €800 (TRLPI Article 24.7), pays the artist on a sliding scale of 4 percent, 3 percent, 1 percent, 0.5 percent, and 0.25 percent across rising price bands to a total cap of €12,500 (Article 24.8), is collected through the visual-arts society VEGAP, and is inalienable and unwaivable for the artist’s life plus seventy years. Because the statutory right is a floor, the museum’s agreements may extend it in the artist’s favor — a lower or zero threshold, a longer term, or application where the statute would not reach. The MME treats resale participation as part of paying an artist correctly, not as an optional courtesy.
How the MME presents history: reproduction, and the original left in place
The MME presents historical mosaic only as rights-cleared reproduction, and it never removes an original from where it belongs. Mosaic survives because it is made of durable substance set in place; the right way to honor a Roman floor or a Byzantine apse is to leave it in situ and reproduce it, not to lift it. This single rule folds preservation and anti-colonial practice together: an institution that never removes an original cannot become a party to the dispersal and dislocation that fill the encyclopedic museums, and the question of restitution is, for originals, moot before it arises — there is nothing to restitute.
Reproduction is mechanical. It takes the form of photographic print, projection, or three-dimensional facsimile — a scanned-and-fabricated facsimile or cast — and never a hand-executed mosaic copy. This distinction is load-bearing. A mechanical reproduction is self-evidently a document: no one mistakes a photograph, a projection, or a scanned facsimile for the artist who made the original, whereas commissioning a living mosaicist to hand-copy a historical work would endorse copying-as-artistic-labor, which is precisely the confusion the museum exists to refute. A three-dimensional facsimile is mechanical reproduction in exactly the sense a photograph is, and it is produced mechanically end to end.
Clearing the rights to a reproduction is a genuine step, and the museum treats it as three distinct layers. First, copyright: for works of antiquity and the medieval world this has long expired, and the MME does not accept a museum’s claim of new copyright in a merely faithful photograph of a public-domain work; for twentieth- and twenty-first-century works, copyright is live and is cleared with the rights-holder. Second, image and licensing terms: where the museum relies on a specific photograph or scan, it honors that source’s license, or it commissions its own. Third, source-nation cultural-heritage claims: several jurisdictions require prior authorization and a fee to reproduce state-held cultural property even when copyright has expired, and the MME secures these authorizations and budgets for the fees before it reproduces. “Rights cleared” means all three layers are cleared, in writing.
Culturally significant and Indigenous works: acknowledgement that pays
The subtlety the museum takes most seriously is that the party holding the legal rights to a work is not always the community to whom the work truly belongs. For culturally significant and Indigenous works, the MME does not treat a cleared copyright as the end of its obligation, and it does not offer acknowledgement as a substitute for material duty. A land-style acknowledgement without benefit is the cultural equivalent of paying an artist in exposure, and the MME refuses it in both forms.
The museum instead extends its governing ethic — pay for what you use — to the community as it does to the individual maker, and it does so through three commitments. The form of benefit is defined with the community, not imposed by the museum: it may be a use fee, a share of directly attributable revenue subject to a floor, the return of high-resolution documentation, the platforming of living artists from that community, a contribution to a community-directed fund where no single rights-holder can be identified, or a combination. The museum obtains free, prior, and informed consent — where “free” means free from coercion, not free of charge — which includes the community’s right to refuse. And authority is established and documented before anything else: the museum determines who can consent and receive through recognized representative or governance bodies, and if that authority cannot be established, the work is not reproduced. A written agreement names the authorized recipient, records the consent, and sets out the agreed benefit, with a clause to revisit it.
Where a living tradition or community exists, the museum prefers a living-artist commission to a reproduction. Commissioning a maker from within a living tradition pays that maker directly, sidesteps the question of reproducing another community’s work, and is usually the stronger exhibit besides.
Not every historical work carries the same duty, and the museum applies a three-tier test so that the obligation is proportionate rather than either negligent or performative:
- Sacred, ceremonial, or funerary works of Indigenous or colonized peoples with a living descendant community — especially where colonial dispossession is part of the history — receive the full measure: free, prior, and informed consent, benefit-sharing, and, where the work is reproduced, a facsimile produced under consultation as described below.
- Living cultural and religious traditions with an identifiable custodian, such as a specific temple or a living craft guild, are served first by a living-artist commission; where the museum reproduces instead, it consults the identifiable custodian and shares benefit.
- Broad public architectural and religious heritage of world religions and historical empires, where authority is diffuse and the material is long-public, is handled through source-nation and holding-institution reproduction clearance and respectful framing, without a consent-and-benefit process that would have no community to address.
When a sacred or culturally restricted work is reproduced, the museum reproduces it as an honest, mechanically produced facsimile, sources the fabrication to a maker in the work’s own region so that economic value returns there, presents it plainly as a facsimile with its sacred meaning and its history of dispossession named, and never renders it in profane materials that masquerade as the sacred. The honesty of the facsimile is itself the respect: it reproduces the form for people who would otherwise never encounter it, and it claims to be nothing more than what it is.
Loans and touring: the MME tours its own work and does not borrow
The MME lends its own work outward and does not borrow. Touring is an earned-revenue program that carries the museum’s own collection into new cities; it is not the traditional museum courtesy of free reciprocal loans, and the museum does not take custody of others’ originals. Borrowing would import insurance cost, custodial liability, and precisely the provenance and dislocation risk this policy exists to avoid. When the MME wants a work it does not have, it buys it from a living artist, or it clears the rights and reproduces it.
Because a tour is a revenue context, it clears at the higher bar. Before any work enters a touring or pop-up exhibition, it passes the full clearance stack — copyright, image and licensing, and source-nation authorization — and, for culturally significant work, consent and benefit-sharing at the commercial standard rather than the lighter one that an educational display inside the museum might warrant. The distinction between critical, educational display and commercial reproduction is real, and touring places a work on the commercial side of it.
What this policy makes unnecessary — and what it keeps
Because the MME acquires no antiquities and no pre-existing originals, and because it never moves an original, the apparatus that governs antiquities collecting falls away: the benchmarking against the 1970 UNESCO Convention, export-license verification, looted-object screening, and restitution exposure are triggered by acquiring old objects, and the MME acquires none. What the museum keeps, and enforces rigorously, is the due diligence its own model demands: clear title and a clean rights chain from each living artist, authenticity, the three-layer reproduction clearance, and the consent-and-benefit standard for culturally significant work. The museum’s due diligence shifts, in a phrase, from the history of an object to the rights of a maker and a community.
Standards and references
This policy is written to sit inside recognized practice. It follows the structure of a collections management policy as set out by the American Alliance of Museums and adopts that field’s stewardship expectation of written policy and full documentation. It observes the ICOM Code of Ethics on valid title and due diligence. It complies with Spanish and European Union law on the artist’s resale right and on the limits of copyright in reproductions of public-domain works, and it treats source-nation cultural-heritage law as binding where it applies. Its approach to Indigenous and traditional cultural material draws on the international framework for the protection of traditional cultural expressions, the CARE principles for Indigenous data governance, and established First Nations cultural protocols. As a Spain-based institution, the MME is governed primarily by ICOM, European Union law, and Spanish statute, and it uses the American Alliance of Museums as a best-practice reference rather than a binding authority.