Vandenburg: This art museum is not adhering to its purpose. Its founders intended it to devote as much attention to contemporary art as to the art of earlier periods, but its collection of contemporary art is far smaller than its other collections. Simpson: The relatively small size of the museum' s contemporary art collection is appropriate. It' s an art museum, not an ethnographic museum designed to collect every style of every period. Its contemporary art collection is small because its curators believe that there is little high-quality contemporary art.
The principle 'An art museum should collect only works that its curators consider to be of high artistic quality' most helps to justify the reasoning in Simpson's response to Vandenburg.