CURATOR
The Museum Journal
Volume 50 • Number 1
January 2007
Prescriptions for Art Museums in the Decade Ahead
Maxwell L. Anderson
The landscape of art museums has been altered since the AAM’s 1992 publication Excellence and Equity. Rather than following a path towards community service or an educational mandate, the field has been led astray by a corporate mindset. The author identifies the primary challenges facing art museums in rebalancing their mission, and suggests a series of remedies to the unrealistic economic model that threatens to exclude education as museums’ primary mandate.
I. The Changed Landscape of Art Museums
Just as corporate culture is being altered by new requirements for due diligence and transparency, similarly, the non-profit community has discovered that it is no longer insulated from tough love and investigative zeal. Art museums, long the preserve of affluent patrons, began to move towards an ideal of community service in the 1980s. More recently, they have been subject to national and personal claims for the return of objects with debatable ownership histories, along with unfiltered attention from bloggers, who don’t observe the politesse habitual to newspaper editors. The result is greater scrutiny by the mainstream press—and by Congress—in a variety of ways. Lawmakers’ intense (if highly selective) search for abuse, special interests, and questionable carve-outs has reached the heretofore unscalable steps of art museums. UBIT (unrelated business income tax), PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes), and other incremental reductions of the tax-exempt status of museums have continued to erode the financial base in recent years. The unexpected demise, in 2006, of a provision in the tax code encouraging gifts of works of art over multiple tax years, is a harbinger of more change to come. There is no doubt that we as museum leaders are partly to blame for our travails. By fomenting business-oriented claims that we are drivers of economic benefit, we have unwittingly altered the basis on which we are judged. Data provided by select institutions in a position to subsidize short-term, expensive art experiences is specific to those infrequent exhibitions, and is not extendable to year-round operations, let alone to peer institutions lacking a critical mass of sustainable access to world-renowned artworks, ample cash, and a tourist market.
Once seen primarily as charitable and educational institutions, art museums are now being regarded as incubators of financial return. By pointing to (unaudited) statistics about ever-increasing attendance as our leading indicator of success, we have argued that art museums’ relevance to the public good—as judged by corporate underwriters, foundations, and private patrons—has as much to do with being engines of economic development as with art preservation and education. In the process, art museums have de-emphasized their role as centers of research and conservation, let alone their potential as a commons for learning and debate about this cultural moment and those of centuries past. This shift has been reinforced by expansion programs, which, over the last decade, have highlighted soaring atriums, the potential for event income, shops, restaurants, and special exhibition galleries that host commercially-oriented blockbusters. Less attention has been given to the relatively unglamorous aspects of expansion: new permanent collection spaces, classrooms, and essential back-of-the-house support spaces, conservation labs, libraries, and design studios. The message has been conspicuously entrepreneurial: we can be compared with theme parks, so we matter.
Unfortunately, the evidence isn’t there to support that claim. Unlike theme parks and even other kinds of museums, art museums have lofty (read: intimidating) goals, charge little, and bear enormous behind-the-scenes costs. Excluding the outsized performance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the other 100-plus largest art museums in North America attracted some $67 million of admissions income last year, while reporting operating expenses of over $1.5 billion. That arithmetic—corroborating that over 95 percent of art museum revenue is not from tickets—proves that as educational, red-ink businesses, art museums do not get their support from the turnstile. Support comes mostly from endowments and wealthy individuals and foundations, not from consumer spending. Art museums, like libraries and universities—our historical peer group—have adapted to the present, but not abandoned their educational mandate. Art museums have always been—and should be—first and foremost about acquiring, caring for, displaying, and teaching about art. Our collective mistake, beginning in the 1980s, was to allow a “business-like” approach to our mission to morph into a profit-minded approach. We deluded ourselves, and those on whom we rely for support, into believing that the “Bilbao effect” was replicable. Perhaps the Guggenheim’s model of a flashy architect-driven museum success like the one in Bilbao, Spain is actually replicable—but only if a regional government is prepared to provide the equivalent of $120 million (in 1997).. Anyone attempting to duplicate this experiment must be prepared to carry the operating costs via continued government subsidies; ride on the coattails of an internationally significant and highly marketable architect who is not yet overexposed; and imagine that an exceptional achievement in a culturally sophisticated European country is the basis on which we should plan our futures. Today’s Guggenheim has pulled back from its earlier ambitions, and under a new director it is pursuing a more proven formula: forget franchising, acquire great art, and show it with imagination.
One unexpected result of the museum sector’s feverish speculation has been to drive serious private collectors to create their own museums, instead of entrusting their treasures to museums more visibly focused on the box office than on the perpetual care and feeding of art. Public museums with gigantic wings designed to impress end up triggering gigantic energy bills, security costs, and only temporarily spiked earned income that settles within a year or two of the ribbon-cutting. In order to justify such overbuilding, museums have sacrificed educational offerings in favor of blockbuster exhibitions—which rarely achieve surpluses when properly accounted for, but do distract the entire staff for months at a time; result in deferred maintenance; and skew the messages the institution needs to send about the evergreen relevance of its permanent collection to a community or a region.
Throughout the 1990s, museum leaders—both trustees and directors—raced towards an impossible goal: to be consistently profitable performers like their largest cousins in the top urban markets. But unless one can rely on endowments that are many multiples of the operating budget, a vibrant tourist trade, a superb permanent collection with which a museum can barter regularly, and sustained competitive advantage in a crowded and increasingly cocooned leisure marketplace, expansion for its own sake is a recipe for ever more red ink. Museums are now facing the financial consequences of irrational exuberance. Most corporations have withdrawn from robust exhibition sponsorship, most foundations have imposed strict limits on what they’re prepared to support, and government grants have all but vanished. In an unwelcome sign of our freshly puritanical times, a schoolteacher was recently fired for exposing students on a field trip to the Dallas Museum of Art to one or more artworks with nudity. This is hardly a climate in which poll-conscious lawmakers, cost-conscious corporations, and conservative foundations will rush to fund art museums in the future.
Meanwhile, the growing impression among members of the press and public is that museums are being dragged into the light, having long enjoyed their insularity even as other non-profit institutions, including universities, hospitals, and fundraising charities, have endured revelations of graft, falsified reporting, and other violations of public charters. In fact, museum leaders for the most part welcome new forms of public disclosure, and benefit from revelations of their diligence in pursuing research, scholarship, and education for the benefit of all. The world around us is changing, in part because easy international travel and the ubiquity of instant media coverage have accentuated our differences at least as much as they have fostered cultural assimilation. While there has always been ignorance and prejudice, the effortless circulation of people and ideas has made manifest the collision of values in society at large, and has exposed us all to the tragic consequences of extremist tactics in furtherance of deeply held beliefs. Surely there is no more important role for art museums than in opening in our eyes to varying points of view. As the highest form of visual communication, art can have the powerful effect not only of equipping a new generation with visual literacy, but also of fostering a more nuanced appreciation of our differences. It is the intrinsic emotional and intellectual value of art, not its commercial potential, which museums should work to lay bare. It’s high time that we turn away from emulating commercial attractions, and concentrate on serving both our patrons and our communities as freshly vital educational institutions. Art museums need not violate their founding intent in order to foster greater awareness and tolerance of our multifaceted world. That said, there is no harm in being open about every aspect of the value of collections and the costs of operations; it is paternalistic to suppress readily available information about art purchases or ongoing activities when they should be a matter of public record.
II. Some Prescriptions for the Future
Fourteen years after the 1992 publication of the American Association of Museums manifesto Excellence and Equity, museum administrators have been sensitized to the premise that community service is indispensable. Unfortunately, our aping of commercial destinations has seriously reduced investment in scholarship and the “excellence” side of the house. Thoughtful professional choices are being challenged by external funding shortfalls, short-sighted governance, media glare, and the pace of contemporary life. For the art museum field to flourish, leaders should encourage or at least debate the value of the following practices:
Training—Our graduate schools are turning out Ph.D.s who lack basic training in the mechanics of art history: looking and thinking critically. While the new generation of scholars has benefited from a more elastic appreciation of the place of art in society, history, and culture, most young art historians can’t assign an unpublished painting to an artist. The academy’s emphasis on theoretical training has downgraded the value of empirical observation. We have a new crop of curators who are too timid to take chances in acquiring objects for our collections, and feel obligated to follow the logic of the marketplace. The result is a numbing similarity in galleries across the nation, rather than a highly personal and fecund mix of speculation, anointment, and celebration of artists of all times.
Museums need to offer basic training in the unfashionable practice of connoisseurship—the ability to recognize the hand of an artist and to make informed choices about the best of his or her work, let alone to appreciate the physical properties and challenges of preserving everything from white-ground Greek vases to panel paintings to digital media.
Collecting—To be incubators of new ideas as well as to preserve the best of our collective past, museums should foster a culture of informed risk-taking in acquiring and supporting
art of all ages. To earn the confidence of our many publics, we should collect artworks which can be shown to have legal title and electronically highlight those about which there may be doubts.
For all but those whose founding missions prevent it, we must support the art of our time with discernment and courage, to combat parochialism and small-mindedness, which lead to restrictions on individual liberties, let alone discrimination and violence. We must recognize the power of the marketplace honestly and openly, by acknowledging whenever possible where works are bought and for how much.
Conserving—The shelf life of art made by unconventional methods requires new technical expertise. Museums need to collaborate in conservation research on how to preserve the art of the past and the art of our time. We then need to document and publish our findings, allowing for cumulative growth in our understanding, rather than lessons learned by one institution at a time.
Presenting—The choices of what to display in permanent collection galleries and exhibition halls should be thought through in unison. Zigzagging from spectacle to spectacle is neither a sustainable approach to programming nor a responsible use of resources. An art museum must have—and articulate—a point of view, whether as a focused collection of one artist or period, or as an encyclopedic collection seeking to draw from the entire well of creativity. Arbitrary offerings unrelated to the museum’s core mission should be scrutinized with particular care. Consumers are more discerning than ever, and yesterday’s Impressionist juggernaut could be today’s gigantic deficit-driver.
Supporting—U.S. museums must combat regressive taxes, since tax-exempt status is how America has led the world in collecting and presenting art over the last generation. Having lost the battle over fractional giving of works of art, we must work to overturn that new legislation, so as to resume encouraging private collectors to donate works of art to public institutions. The estate tax is the next frontier. Conservative lawmakers are pursing its repeal on the false premise that it is deleterious to small family businesses, when in fact it only affects the super-wealthy. For generations the estate tax has insured that, in a nation reliant on non-profits, rather than government, to foster health, education, and myriad other needs, the wealthy are obligated to give back to society upon their death. In keeping with the spirit of the Founding Fathers, American tax law has long been progressive on this point, preferring to see wealth created in one generation in large part benefiting the public at large, rather than fostering its concentration in privileged families. The deafening self-censorship of the art museum community on the unwelcome prospect of the repeal of the Estate Tax reflects the presumed interests of our wealthiest supporters, not of the institutions we lead. It’s time to speak truth to power: Without the intergenerational transfer of support to art museums, our highly leveraged buildings will face financial traumas the likes of which have not yet been imagined.
Turnstile-focused entertainment is short-sighted. Fixed fees for general admission discourage spontaneous visits and make art museums de facto attractions rather than porous educational institutions. Museums should focus on building operating endowments and annual contributions to the point where they can afford to offer free general admission to the permanent collection, even if special exhibitions are ticketed. In the economics of a healthy art museum, a significant percentage of operating expenses comes from endowment and from contributed income, thereby promoting artistic and intellectual freedom with less compromise. Earned income serves as icing on the cake, derived from shop income, special events, selectively ticketed educational programs, and membership. In such instances, museums are better off providing free general admission, while levying charges for exhibitions, events, and programs that require extraordinary spending.
Engaging—Providing clever interpretive tools for our prospective audiences is necessary but not sufficient. Museums have to be intrepid in pursuing engagement with every potential
visitor by researching potential audiences, inviting them in, and serving their particular needs. This approach requires more than thoughtfully conceived labels. It requires a dedicated strategy specific to the regions we serve. It further requires a heightened sensitivity to the charge that art museums are “elitist.” While it’s fine to celebrate our role in leading people to a greater understanding of a shared cultural inheritance, we have to be diligent and unrelenting in welcoming the public’s participation in our mission. A promising recent initiative in this regard is through social computing, or tagging, as illustrated by the initiative to be found at www.steve.museum. Just as Wikipedia has spawned a new way of collaborating via the Internet to assemble and update our collective knowledge, www.steve.museum presages a community of museumgoers actively participating in the provision of educational and social exchanges online.
Governing—Disinterested oversight and shared responsibility are among the hallmarks of good governance. Self-perpetuating boards of trustees need to reflect the communities
they serve, be clear about their museum’s vision and mission, support the ambitions of the professional staff or find new leadership, and reflect regularly on their progress in safeguarding the unfettered experience of art. Boards need to delegate financial discussions to their finance committee, and insure that the committee’s composition includes mission-focused as well as numbers-focused trustees. That way, full board meetings can allow ample time to consider the multiple obligations of museum staff: from fostering research, to caring for art, to opening the eyes of audiences. Perhaps the greatest challenge to the good governance of art museums has to do with the participation of volunteer leadership in the art market. The very individuals who are charged with disinterested oversight of museums are often accomplished collectors, whose influence may be greater than is publicly acknowledged. Safeguards must be put in place so that decisions to collect and exhibit works are made by scholars for the public’s benefit, rather than for the benefit of collectors.
Managing—Art museum directors can no longer afford to operate in a vacuum. Transparent leadership requires the disclosure of information that has traditionally been seen as sensitive, such as details on what museums acquire and from whom, how museums attract support and spend it, who they have succeeded in serving, and how they measure success. Transparency reveals not only the mechanics of museum operations, but also the philosophy of management. Directors can benefit from having their leadership style subject to public scrutiny; an approach that once passed as heroic and visionary may today come across as arrogant and single-minded.
Planning—Museum leaders should reward entrepreneurship but safeguard academic
standards, promoting scholarship and publishing. They should focus on collections growth and care and imaginative exhibitions and programs rather than short-term spikes of attention. They should court donors who see the big picture and keep self-interest in check. They should invest in technology as an essential tool, not an end in itself. And they should seek to treat each artwork and each visitor with equal respect.
III. Conclusions
It’s time to rebalance the way we present our purpose: Art museums are intrinsically important just by caring for the world’s art treasures. The benefit of holding these collections in trust for the public is that art provides a nuanced understanding of our place in the world. Art museums articulate the centrality of art in life. We need to go easier on instrumental arguments—emphasizing less how we can solve all social ills in a community or drive investment and economic opportunity. We need to be more meticulous in identifying achievable goals of social betterment, such as reaching underserved school-age audiences, but without losing sight of our complex obligations to the collections we preserve. And we must stop claiming that we’re self-supporting, let alone that we can carry local economies on our backs. We need the help of generous patrons so that we can serve broad audiences. But neither donors nor visitors should dictate our artistic choices; these should be adventurous and compelling, and not the result of undue compromise. Reclaiming the educational mandate of museums is not the same as abandoning public relevance. On the contrary, in our entertainment-saturated world, it is to art museums that we should all be able to turn in search of a context for life today, where experts may build on the shoulders of giants who came before us.
This is not a conservative posture, but a long-overdue acknowledgment that the pendulum has swung from fortress to bazaar, rather than settling over a sensible middle ground. One appropriate model is the traditional public library, safeguarding and sharing treasures—including manuscripts, first editions, and archives—for preservation, scholarly review, and public access. We are always pleased to see foot traffic in libraries, but we measure their importance first and foremost by the quality of their holdings, their professionalism in handling collections, their degree of openness, and their creativity in adapting to rapid technological change with the goal being to serve audiences. We don’t put first the number of people entering their lobbies or even the number of items in circulation.
Museums have strayed into the red light district out of a fear of irrelevance, but risk consigning their core mission of researching, collecting, preserving, and interpreting to the bottom of the priority list. If the primary measure of relevance is how many people come through the doors, rather than how well museums provide access to art treasures, we risk choosing every program based on its potential consumer demand, and losing sight of the long-term obligations of museums to foster knowledge and appreciation of visual creativity from the past and present. The lowest common denominator in museum work is to be found not in professional care of art, but in the extent of spectacle offered. Museum curators are sometimes stereotyped as narrowly trained experts who lack the broad perspective of directors. But in fact it is curatorial expertise that separates art museums from other art venues, including convention centers, corporate lobbies, and public squares. Each of those non-institutional venues makes compromises in the selection of art for display and experience. The art museum sector would do well to listen to curators, the conscience of our field, and bring them along to help shoulder the burden that administrators bear.
The best prescription? Make a consistent and compelling case for the experience of artworks, rather than emphasizing the physical trappings and faux economics we’ve devised to emulate commercial attractions. We need to assure the continued provision of private support on which U.S. museums were founded, and on which their fate rests in the decades to come. The intergenerational transfer of trillions of dollars over the next decades can be shared by art museums that freshly emphasize their educational mandate, or we can watch public-minded donors migrate to those other categories of non-profits, such as universities and libraries, that honor their founding intent with entrepreneurial ambition. If we don’t halt museums’ slide towards a commercial operating paradigm, we risk being perceived merely as incompetent members of the entertainment sector. After all, if we divide the operating budgets of leading art museums by their attendance totals, each visitor costs the average art museum about $60.
Even more important than our need to rebuild the confidence of select patrons who can support our mission is the need to halt further erosion of tax exemption, which may be accelerated by an emphasis on commercial activities. We must be able to say truthfully and with a consistent voice that we are first and foremost serving the public interest, rather than emulating commercial attractions, or our lawmakers would be justified in continuing to reduce our tax-exempt status. If we sacrifice our charitable purpose in the illusory quest for solvency through ticket sales, we will end up not only alienating potential donors, but also finding that admissions income becomes taxable, or worse still that donations lose their tax-deductibility. Museum leaders have to find a way forward that is both entrepreneurial and focused on education, rather than profit-minded to the detriment of our commitment to preserving and sharing the world’s art treasures. With the right mix of public-spirited service and devotion to scholarship and preservation, art museums will have a bright future.
Maxwell L. Anderson (manderson@imamuseum.org) is director and CEO of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, 4000 Michigan Road, Indianapolis, IN 46208-3326.
References
American Association of Museums. 1991. Excellence and Equity: Education and the Public Dimensions of Museums. Washington, DC: American Association of Museums.
Anderson, M. L. 2004. Metrics of success in art museums. The Compleat Reader. Los Angeles: Getty Leadership Institute.