Our homes command extensive views, And with assistance from the Jews, We have been able to dispose of Rows and rows and rows of Gainsboroughs and Lawrences, Some sporting prints of Aunt Florence's, Some of which were rather rude.

As that bit of anti-semitic doggerel by Noël Coward (from a song called “The Stately Homes of England”) suggests, the city of Detroit is not breaking new ground in facing the prospect of having to sell a few paintings from the Detroit Institute of Arts in order to make ends meet. There is a rich tradition of wastrels squandering the family fortune, then taking a few canvases to the pawnbroker’s.

Under pressure from the city’s creditors, Kevyn Orr, the emergency city manager appointed by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, has retained Christie’s, the famous auction house, to evaluate the museum’s collection in case the movers show up some day soon to take the paintings off their hooks and the sculptures from their pedestals. They’ll have a hard time removing the museum’s most famous works—frescoes of men at work by the Mexican communist artist Diego Rivera—since frescoes are paint applied directly to plaster walls while they are still wet. The paint becomes part of the wall and hard to separate.

Is Mr. Orr serious? Or is he just trying to give the city a scare, to sober it up? It’s a standard consequence of bankruptcy, which Detroit declared in July (the largest city in the United States ever to do so), that filers risk losing ownership of their assets. The feckless hedge fund manager loses his Porsche; the feckless city loses its Caravaggio. There are differences, of course. The main difference is that, when a painting is removed from the wall of a museum and sold—probably to some vulgar Russian nouveau-billionaire, The New York Times sniffed the other day in almost those words—it most likely disappears from public view. The Times article, by art critic Roberta Smith, made no pretense of objectivity. She detects “the smell of amoral opportunism. ... Merely considering a priceless collection as an ‘asset’ ... is pernicious and predatory.” Most of the public commentary about the Detroit situation has been in that vein: To even think about selling works of art from the museum to pay Detroit’s debts would be about as philistine as you can get. Case closed.

The feckless hedge fund manager loses his Porsche; the feckless city loses its Caravaggio.

Well, I don’t know. As a native Detroiter, I hope the art institute gets to keep its collection intact. But I’d like to see a bit more deliberation before everyone sinks into that high-minded conclusion. After all, the city owes mostly blameless investors some $18 billion. If it’s going to stiff these people, aren’t there more important assets to preserve? How about the neonatal unit at the city hospital? Art is important, but should it trump saving babies’ lives?

By not thinking outside the box, Detroit is losing an ideal opportunity to test a suggestion made three decades ago by a curmudgeonly Harvard political scientist named Edward Banfield. Banfield wrote a book called The Democratic Muse, in which he proposed that paintings and sculptures in public museums be sold and replaced by high-quality reproductions. Most museum visitors, he argued, couldn’t tell the difference (I certainly couldn’t) and thus would get the same experience from the fakes as they would from the originals. You can take this logic even further. Who needs a perfect reproduction, or even a good one? Most people’s appreciation of art doesn’t come from seeing original works in museums. It comes from posters or postcards or beach towels or t-shirts. Museums themselves sell these things. They bring pleasure to people. There must be some aesthetic value even in these crude artifacts.