I'm not sure I follow. Suppose that actual genuineness is a lower priority than having something exciting to display while not getting caught with fakes. In that case a murky acquisition pipeline is still a benefit, in that the obscurity makes it harder to prove the fraud.
This is of course a pretty common behavior in corporate America. Look at the number of executives during the financial crisis who suddenly went from, "We are financial geniuses, deserving of great power and greater compensation," to, "We were innocent victims who could not possibly have known what was going on in the companies we control utterly." Plausible deniability lets the powerful claim credit for the successes and deny responsibility for the failures.
> Plausible deniability lets the powerful claim credit for the successes and deny responsibility for the failures.
Except that whole racket in your financial industry analogy depended entirely on a 3rd party (ie, a government packed with their buddies from private school) to tip the scales in their favour, on either end, for it to actually work.
There's no third party being corrupted to give credibility to the museum here, they can't really just give credibility to themselves like that - just as the bankers couldn't bail themselves out, when they otherwise were faced with devastating and long-term financial consequences for their behaviour (ie, the appropriate response or natural outcome).
A museums reputation matters and events like this directly affect it... which is why we have major news stories and Wikipedia articles about it.
I don't think it's helpful to shame them for engaging with the scholarly community, or to shame them for attempting to be good merely because of past behaviour (which is far too common practice today on social media, as if people and organizations can't become better or more responsible, and are forever just evil like in movies).
It sounds like the natural corrections processes were already working here... they got pressured from the sources of credibility (scholars, media, etc) which was influenced because of prior bad acts where they lost reputation already. If they attempted to corrupt those sources instead of engaging with them I'd be more concerned. But really there's not much here, especially given the negative spin in the article, which is what the OP was critiquing. The end result was bad-for-business PR and they probably paid millions for stuff they can't now use in their museum, sounds alright to me, things are working... I also doubt they'll be as trusting next time.
I don't think you're correct about the 2008 crisis. But even if you're right, my point is broader than that. Plenty of executives play a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose game, with plausible deniability as part of that. Look at almost any industry with significant negative externalities.
And of course the museum can give itself credibility. Just by opening as a museum, for a start. But also by striving to appear credible to the million or so visitors who pay $20/head to tour it each year. And museums always perform respectableness for donors.
Events like this do somewhat subtract from that, of course. But only if they get caught. That could be an incentive toward better scholarship. But it also could be an incentive toward higher-quality, more difficult to discover fakes.
This is of course a pretty common behavior in corporate America. Look at the number of executives during the financial crisis who suddenly went from, "We are financial geniuses, deserving of great power and greater compensation," to, "We were innocent victims who could not possibly have known what was going on in the companies we control utterly." Plausible deniability lets the powerful claim credit for the successes and deny responsibility for the failures.