Institutional Necrophagy

The process by which cultural institutions consume the symbolic authority of the objects in their collections, reducing living artifacts to administrative files. The institution that practices Institutional Necrophagy preserves objects while eliminating their functional existence.

The museum is not the sanctuary it presents itself as. It is, in Foucauldian terms, a mechanism of power that manages objects by rendering them inert. An object behind glass in climate-controlled storage is preserved. It is also functionally dead: deprived of the conditions under which it generates meaning. OAC's Custodian's Contract is explicitly designed as a counter-mandate: the custodian keeps the object alive by living with it, using it, allowing it to witness new events.

The term names a consumption, not a negligence, and that is the point of the word. The institution is not failing to care for the object. It is feeding on it. The object's accumulated authority is converted into the institution's standing, and the object receives nothing back, because a thing that cannot be used cannot acquire further history.

This is why the charge cannot be answered by better conservation. Conservation is the mechanism, not the remedy. The more completely an object is preserved against change, the more completely it is prevented from continuing to mean anything new, and the institution's claim to be its guardian grows stronger as the object's capacity to speak for itself declines.

The framework's alternative is not neglect. It is custody with use, on the argument that an object's meaning is produced by its participation in a life rather than by its removal from one. That position is falsifiable and expensive, and the Burden of Preservation is what keeps it from collapsing into an excuse for damage.