624 WORKS MISPLACED AT TEL AVIV MUSEUM OF ART

According to Haaretz, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art has misplaced 624 works from its permanent collection, the Tel Aviv municipal comptroller revealed in a recent report. The museum employs outdated techniques in monitoring its collection, the report found, raising the likelihood of artwork going missing.

Museum administrators were unable yesterday to say which, if any, of the works have been lost, or whether they had simply been overlooked due to a registration error.

“We are currently working to identify the works in question,” a museum official said. “As for the misplacement of pieces, every museum curator knows the location of artworks under his authority at any given moment.”

The museum is required to conduct an inventory every eight months, but records show none has been made since 1992. Before that, the last count was performed in 1975. A comparison between the two inventories turned up a discrepancy of hundreds of works, among them 485 original pieces.

Comptroller Haia Horowitz wrote in the report, released in January, that the museum continues to use antiquated registration methods rather than the computerized systems common in many museums today. Horowitz found that thirteen sculptures in the museum’s collection are currently unidentified, their descriptive tags having been misplaced.

A statement from the museum said it is currently conducting a full count of its collection.