Museums may soon rent you the ninety percent nobody sees

Under a funding proposal of the kind that tends to begin as a joke in a budget meeting, a national museum could offer its storage as a subscription. For a monthly fee, a minor work would be delivered to a private home for one season, hung by two people in gloves, and collected again in the spring. The museum would keep title. The subscriber would keep the wall.

The argument would write itself. The overwhelming majority of any large collection is never on display, and never will be: the storerooms hold the works that lost a curatorial argument at some point in the last century and have been waiting quietly for a rematch. They are not secrets. They are simply the parts of the collection nobody has found four metres for.

The practical annex is where the proposal would become recognisably itself. A humidity sensor would be fixed beside the frame and report every six hours. A photograph of the wall would be taken before hanging and after removal. An excess would be payable by the subscriber. A schedule of forbidden positions would list the radiator, the bathroom, the south-facing window, the kitchen, and any wall a cat has previously been observed to reach.

The tiers would be unusually honest about value. The entry level would offer unattributed nineteenth-century landscapes, of which every national collection holds roughly forty more than it can explain. The middle tier would offer a minor work by a named artist. The upper tier would be described as by application, which is the museum's way of saying by acquaintance.

And then the finding that would justify the whole experiment: the waiting list would form for storage, not for the galleries. Subscribers would not ask for the famous painting they have already queued for twice. They would ask for the ordinary one — the small harbour, the unremarkable interior, the portrait of somebody's aunt — because what a household actually wants from art is not an event but a thing to look at every morning while the kettle boils.

Curators would object, and not frivolously. A public collection dispersed by subscription is deaccessioning with a delivery van, and a work in a living room is a work outside professional care. The counter-argument would be that a crate in a basement is also not public, and that nobody has ever written a conservation report about being looked at.

The pilot would close the way pilots do, with a report noting that the works returned in good condition and that a small number of subscribers asked whether they might keep theirs. The report would not record whether anybody asked to keep a gallery.