Fellow Appraiser Selma Paul, ISA CAPP sent me this fun Wall Street Journal article about retired baby boomer running amok as museum volunteers. I loved the title, "Docents Gone Wild" and wish I had come up with it.
The article notes the number of volunteers is expected to grow, which is good, but some of them are, according to the WSJ article going "rogue" and causing problems. Take a few minutes to read, as it is an enjoyable article.
The Wall Street Journal reports
Source: The Wall Street JournalArts-loving retired baby boomers are hustling to volunteer as museum tour guides—but they sometimes go rogue, touching the art, misstating facts and committing other infractions
Kat Braz, a graphic designer from West Lafayette, Ind., was visiting the Iolani Palace in Honolulu this past December when she said a guide scolded her for straying from the group. The docent, an older man in a Hawaiian shirt, insinuated that certain people on the tour were fat, she said, and mocked them for not knowing obscure historical trivia. Ms. Braz, 35, couldn’t wait for the experience to end. “I’ve never had anybody be so rude before,” she said.
More arts-loving baby boomers—educated, experienced and recently retired—are hustling to become museum tour guides. The number of volunteers ages 65 and older is projected to climb nearly 23% to 13 million in 2020 from 10.6 million today, according to the Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal agency focused on volunteering.
Yet while institutions say they welcome this new wave of graying volunteers, behind closed doors some museum staffers are growing impatient with docents flouting their supervisors, misstating facts, touching the art, and other infractions. “There’s been an uptick in ‘docents gone wild’ moments,” said Maggie Guzowski, who runs the arts-employee blog “When You Work at a Museum.”
In Hawaii, Zita Cup Choy, historian and docent educator for the Iolani Palace, said volunteer docents must train one day a week for 12 weeks and score at least 90% on a 130-question test. Still, she said, there can be misfires on the tours, which cost $21.75 per adult: “We always expect our volunteers to be accurate and respectful, but once they get out on their own, sometimes the way they say things, visitors can misinterpret or take in the wrong way,” she said.
At the recent annual conference of the American Alliance of Museums in Atlanta, headaches involving docents and other volunteers occupied an entire session. In a forum titled “Waking Up From Volunteer Nightmares,” professionals discussed a museum tour guide whose graphic commentary about World War II terrified small children. Another spoke about husband-and-wife volunteers who spent their shifts bickering. Someone else described a clique of volunteers who were so bossy they even lectured the museum director.
Session moderator Richard Harker, education and outreach manager for the Museum of History and Holocaust Education at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Ga., asked participants if they ever fired a volunteer on a Friday only to see that person back on Monday as if nothing had happened. A smattering of knowing laughter ensued. Referring to insubordination in the volunteer ranks, Mr. Harker said: “It’s like ‘Mutiny on the Bounty.’”
With a steady march of older Americans entering the volunteer force—about 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day and will keep doing so for the next 14 years—museums are finding themselves in the uncomfortable role of caregiver. At the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in Atlanta, one docent collapsed just before a tour last year. “It was a wake-up call,” said Jennifer Reid, the museum’s group tour and volunteer coordinator, who now makes sure she has emergency contacts and a clear protocol in the event of a problem.
Volunteer tour guides will be showing and telling at many big museum shows this summer. A look at five exhibitions featuring everything from Impressionist paintings to Hawaiian feathered pieces.
Working as a tour guide is no trivial matter. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York demands a three-year commitment from its volunteer tour guides. The Museum of Modern Art in New York stations its volunteers around the museum to answer questions and provide information but doesn’t ask them to give tours—only paid professionals are allowed in that role. New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art uses docents for public tours, but it asks paid experts to guide student groups.
‘The Rise of Sneaker Culture’
A show at the Brooklyn Musuem this summer examining the cultural impact of the universal footwear starts in the 19th century and ends, 170 designs later, in the present.
At the Whitney, only about 30 docent candidates are picked from more than 100 applications, with about 10 dropping off before the end of training. Contenders embark on at least a year of study, examining art history and the finer points of public speaking, including gesturing and eye contact. Some hopefuls are cut if they fail to grasp the content or commit the time. Docents must step up to their responsibilities—usually once-a-week shifts—or face the consequences. “If someone’s flaking out, that’s grounds for dismissal,” said Ellen Tepfer, the museum’s manager of docent and teaching fellow programs.
Managing a generation of volunteers who grew up as rebels isn’t always easy. At the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, some volunteers revolted last year after the museum tried to overhaul its docent program. In an effort to reach a broader audience and attract some younger tour guides, the museum told its docents there would be a new system, one that included direct outreach to college-aged students interested in arts-related careers. The Hirshhorn initiated a structured schedule of work shifts, additional training and periodic performance evaluations, requirements that certain docents had challenged in the past, said museum spokeswoman Kelly Carnes. “There was this culture of resistance,” she said. “They really felt entitled after spending enough time here not to make any changes from the way they had previously done things.”
Docents were invited to pursue jobs under the new system, but a number of them felt forced out. “A lot of us were insulted,” said Laurie Nakamoto, 65, a social worker from Arlington, Va., who was a docent at the Hirshhorn for 36 years before the program was disbanded in the fall. She said her fellow volunteers had worked diligently in the past, attempted to sit in on training for special exhibitions and tried to improve their relationship with the museum, but they were rebuffed. “They did nothing to make us feel good about ourselves as docents.”
Institutions tread carefully around a volunteer workforce often dominated by the elderly, wary of whisperings about ageism. In most cases, volunteers aren’t protected as employees under federal antidiscrimination statutes, said Monique Chase, an employment lawyer at the New York firm Outten & Golden. There are potential exceptions for seniors who can prove that they received significant job-related benefits and worked in the capacity of paid employees. While federal standards of what constitutes employment are strict, some state and local laws may offer greater leeway in determining when volunteers qualify as such staff.
Ms. Guzowski, the arts blogger, says she’s received dozens of anonymous horror stories about volunteers from arts staffers since she started the site 18 months ago. Among the more memorable submissions: a docent who didn’t like artworks with nudity and marked an “x” on every exposed breast on the map at her undisclosed museum (total: 29) and a docent who set off alarms when she let her family into another unnamed museum for an after-hours tour (the chief curator had to confirm to police that she wasn’t a thief). Earlier this year, the blog ran an item about docents who wanted to bring live bugs into a museum and kill them in front of visitors to demonstrate a textile dyeing technique. Ms. Guzowski, who says she’s worked in the profession for 12 years, declines to name the Washington-area museum where she works as an interpretive educator to avoid embarrassing its staff.
Evidence suggests only a minority of museum visitors enjoy guided tours. A 2010 study of 40,000 visitors to 100 American museums found 31% of respondents said they enjoyed taking guided tours, compared with 64% who preferred visiting on their own with supporting materials, said Susie Wilkening, a senior consultant at Reach Advisors Museums R+D, which conducted the research. “It’s a feeling of a loss of control when you’re with a guided tour,” she said. “We hear things about ‘canned monologues’ and not even the possibility of a question being asked.”
Volunteers who try to spice up tours by improvising may do so at their peril. A couple of years ago, Barbara Curry was touring the Old Exchange & Provost Dungeon in Charleston, S.C., when her colonial docent went off script. “We got to one stop and he said, ‘Well, I’m going to tell you this and I just made it up, but it could be true,’” said Ms. Curry, a 61-year-old retired energy company executive from Leawood, Kan. The guide told a story about what prisoners might have done with insects while locked in the building’s basement centuries ago. “The whole thing was quite, ‘Ugh, we just paid for that?’”
Larry R. Page, who leads the volunteers at the Old Exchange, said that at the time of Ms. Curry’s visit, the docent program was in the midst of an overhaul. “Through our quality control we’ve managed to take out individuals who were doing things like that,” he said of her tour. Both paid guides and volunteers give tours at the venue.
Docent Tom Finley poses for a portrait in front of a F4U-4 Corsair aircraft at the USS Midway Museum in San Diego. ENLARGE
Docent Tom Finley poses for a portrait in front of a F4U-4 Corsair aircraft at the USS Midway Museum in San Diego. PHOTO: MICHAL CZERWONKA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
At the USS Midway Museum in San Diego, volunteer tour guides are a central part of the experience. Visitors encounter at least 40 of these docents on a typical visit. “This is a 1,000-foot-long ship—there’s a lot to learn about it,” said Tom Finley, who has logged more than 4,500 volunteer hours. The 72-year-old retired Navy captain is a former pilot who is stationed on the flight deck to explain to visitors how planes were catapulted off the ship. He said docents start interacting with tourists from the moment they line up for tickets. Such exchanges, and the camaraderie he feels with the other docents—many also retired military—are a big reason he trained in a classroom for seven weeks and stayed for a decade. “I went through the indoctrination process, I loved it and I’ve loved it ever since,” he said.
Rarely, the Midway must cull its ranks of 425 docents: One legendary case involves a volunteer candidate who claimed to be a three-star admiral but was later suspected of fabricating his naval history, said Jim Nash, docent program director. “We called his home and asked to speak to the Admiral. His wife was kind of silent and we never heard from him again.”
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