Museums and Business

Fellow appraiser Claudia Hess sent me an interesting article/post from the Daily Beast on the rationale for the recent termination of chief curator.  The article shows how museums are attempting to balance the need for visitors, growth and endowments against the needs of artistic exhibitions and our cultural heritage.  In today's economy you do need both, and at times it is very difficult to obtain the proper mix.  Yet, this is not to say a museums sole goal should be endowment funding and goals for record visitation, but these and other marketing and financial factors are relevant and should be included in the equation.

The Daily Beast reports 

it showed how far astray the museum world is headed because of the big-business brains at its helm.

Broad laid out a history of successes at L.A. MoCA. And he discussed some recent and very real troubles, as its endowment was whittled down. But Broad’s recipe for solving those troubles was phrased in essentially a businessman’s terms and had nothing to do with art or museums. He said MoCA needed to grow its client base (of course he used the term “audience”). And he said that should be done by heading down-market (of course he phrased that in terms of making MoCA more “populist” and less “insular”).

A museum that drew a billion people a year, and made billions in profits, would count as a disaster if minds weren’t changed about art in the process.

But whereas growth itself is by definition a good thing in business, at least where profit’s concerned, it makes no sense in museums. What’s the right number of people to have in your galleries? The “record” attendance of a million you were so proud of in 1985? That later record that came to twice that, which you trumpeted in 2000? Or the 10 million you’ll have to receive in the year 2100, if endless growth is what your board demands? Are your shows better—more enlightening, enriching, mind-altering—when your guests are packed in like sardines and have 10 seconds to look at each picture?

It’s not that hard to ensure larger crowds. You could simply host some of the shows that I imagined at this article’s start. But ask people what art and museums are for, and I doubt that they’ll list “crowd parking” as central. They’ll say that great art should take you somewhere you’ve never been. That it should provide feelings and thoughts that you don’t get in the rest of the culture. That, if it’s at true masterpiece level, it should have the kind of heft we assume in Shakespeare and Beethoven. And they’ll say that museums should make such art available—to the absolutely largest number of people who are looking for that kind of thing, and not for something else.

Audience’s don’t mind coming to a museum to get experiences they are used to getting elsewhere—a dose of pop culture, or some light entertainment. Some men might come for vintage soft-core. But in those cases the museum’s just another venue, like a stadium or cinema, without any special claim on our hearts or our minds, or on our generosity. Attract more people by making the museum more like the rest of the culture—find success on those businesslike terms—and you’re guaranteeing the failure of the enterprise as a whole, at its most fundamental.

Source: The Daily Beast