Maybe the Times arts critics have it in for the Brooklyn Museum. Or maybe they just don’t believe museum curators should get to know the audiences they’re creating exhibitions for. Then again, some museums don’t believe that either, which is why “front end” evaluation is often a botched job.

So I tried not to get defensive when I read this paragraph in art critic Ken Johnson’s review of Brooklyn’s new show on Plains Indian tipis.

Beyond some basic historical context, the exhibition offers no revelatory perspective on its contents. That might be partly because, as the organizers, Nancy B. Rosoff and Susan Kennedy Zeller (both Brooklyn Museum curators) point out in their catalog preface, part of the planning process involved focus groups and visitor surveys “to determine the level of visitor interest in and knowledge of the tepee and Plains culture.” They also invited a team of American Indian scholars, artists and tribal members to vet their plans. The result is an exhibition that speaks down to its audience, assuming a low level of sophistication, and that does as little as possible to offend or stir controversy.

On one level, this is the familiar highbrow take on visitor studies: If you ask the public what they want from an arts or culture experience, you’re doomed from the get-go. Focus groups yield lowest-common-denominator thinking, which should have no place in planning encounters with the great or challenging or profound. The museum should exercise its cultural authority and decide what visitors need to see and learn, without getting sidetracked by what they want.

But when you gather museum-goers in a focus group or ask them questions on a survey, do they really tell you, “I want this exhibition to talk down to me. I want the interpretation of objects to be bland and inoffensive”?

Of course not. The real issue here is what kinds of questions the museum asks and how it understands — and makes use of — the answers. I hasten to add that I haven’t seen the exhibition yet, and I may not agree with Johnson’s that it is condescending or bland. (From what I’ve been able to see online, it looks promising.) ...

Did you hear about the museum in Sweden that didn’t realize three of its paintings were missing…until they were found by police raiding an apartment? Thank goodness for those “Malmo Art Museum” labels on the back of the canvasses. The story should remind us not to get too self-righteous about museums selling art to private collections, where (heaven forbid) they might not be available for public viewing.

Apparently the Malmo Art Museum in Sweden was unaware that a $1.5 million work by Edvard Munch and two other paintings in its collection had been stolen, until police discovered them in a raid. It’s a cringe-laugh-cry tale for anyone who cares about art and museums, with the laughter permissible only because it has a happy ending.

(By the way, the stolen Munch was "Two Friends," which I couldn't find an image of, not "The Scream." But the latter seems apt.)

For me, the story also shines light on the current debates about deaccessioning. (For those of you outside the visual art orbit, that’s the process by which museums sell, trade, or otherwise get rid of objects in their collections.) The furor over museums and universities like the National Academy Museum, Brandeis's Rose Art Museum, and Fisk University (pictured) trying to sell artworks from their collections to put themselves on a firmer financial footing — and the hawkish response from professional and accrediting bodies like AAM and AAMD — is understandable. But it hinges on several arguments about the harm that such sales would do to those institutions’ credibility and to the “public trust.” And the story of Malmo’s Munch suggests that one of those arguments doesn’t (pardon the pun) hold up. …