The Museum Time Bomb: Overbuilt, Overtraded, Overdrawn

 

Introduction

The past three decades have seen a huge museum building boom in Western Europe and America. Combined with an emphasis on so-called “blockbuster” exhibitions, museums are popular as never before. Visitors stand in queues for hours in order to pass a few minutes shuffling in front of old master paintings or experience an epiphany in a seconds-long encounter with the Impressionists, and some museums have been obliged to stay open “round the clock” to meet the demand. More than ever, museum attendance is seen as an indispensable feature in a modern lifestyle. The statistics reflect the giddy heights to which the numbers of museum visits have soared, and overall the number of people visiting museums has increased substantially during the past decade.

Nevertheless, there are signs that these rosy statistics mask a troubling decline in visits to middle-aged, middle-sized institutions, which are often unable to generate the exhibitions said to be necessary to keep the visitor’s appetite for novelty whetted. Moreover, regardless of size or location, there are widespread problems caused by falling museum income as the public sector reduces its commitment to museums, and the private sector fails to support core museum activities.

When funding is available, it is often a one-time investment linked to new museum building—a “poison pill” that leaves museums with higher future operating costs but no guarantee of future revenue. In Britain, where lottery funds were extensively used to fuel the museum building craze, the first of the lottery-funded projects are in financial trouble already, and some are already considering closing. There is a time bomb in making as scores of new museum projects are poised to go bankrupt during the coming decades. Their collapse will put a massive burden on the public purse if they are to be saved, or expose them and the communities that they support to major disruptions as they are closed or converted to new uses. What is happening to the museum field? Is the museum boom sustainable? Can museums continue to fulfill their mission and still survive in a time when public and private priorities are changing rapidly?

Since its earliest history, in addition to its role as the collector and preserver of material culture, the museum has been seen to perform two other significant roles, that of education, and that of leisure. The importance of these roles has varied significantly in emphasis over the past two centuries, and both models have an excellent pedigree. However, given the polarization of these two roles in the years after WWII, arguments for funding have often been linked to the degree to which the museum delivers value as education or as leisure activity.

In principle, public money—the widow’s taxes—supports public education, while the private sector—most commonly the individual user—pays for private pleasure. Traditionally in Europe the museum has been funded almost entirely from the public purse as a scholarly resource on the one hand (akin to support for the university as a site for the production of new knowledge) and as a site of public education on the other. In America, where the bias has been towards private or charitable funding, the museum has been financed primarily as a leisure activity, a public platform for the educated flâneur. Unfortunately, while the terms leisure and education remain the same, the definition of the scope and expectations associated with them has undergone drastic revision in the past forty years. As a consequence, the museums are caught rather uncomfortably on the sharp horns of a funding dilemma.

On the one hand, museums that have pursued their traditional educational mission have found that the education they are now expected to provide is increasingly “remedial”—directed at filling gaps in the basic education of an increasingly broad spectrum of users. Increasingly, public funding for museums is tied to meeting specific targets aimed at addressing issues of social inclusion. At the same time, confronted by data that show how limited museums are in providing primary education, the public purse is questioning its return on investment—museums are just too expensive to operate for the relatively brief educational encounter enjoyed (or not) by most users. The cost per visitor of a four-hour visit per year (if the museum is lucky) is out of proportion to the results of a similar investment in the classroom or in the media.

On the other hand, those museums who followed the call to join the “leisure industry” and provide entertainment—even “edutainment”—are now also threatened. Public authorities are understandably reluctant to fund entertainment—in their opinion a frivolous private experience. In order to increase visitor numbers, and thereby revenue, museums are forced further and further “down market.” First conceived as an encyclopedia, the museum has increasingly become a 3-D walkthrough documentary. From the documentary it is but a short step to the Hollywood-style blockbuster. At the same time, even blockbuster exhibitions do not benefit from sufficient economies of scale to enable museums to “sell” the museum experience at a price the public is willing to pay. The value-for-money of the museum as entertainment is unfortunately relatively low, while the costs are substantial. Whereas a Walt Disney visit or a Hollywood film enjoy economies of scale whereby they can be expected to pay for themselves from revenue, few museums break even with exhibitions—even fewer when all the overheads are taken into account.

This paper explores both paths the museums have followed in the past decades, education and entertainment, and suggests that they are both dead ends. What is called for is a reassertion of the core values of the museum, and a reaffirmation of its core competences. Only then can the appropriate funding model—sufficient and sustainable—be identified.

The Museum Mission

In an earlier and less complicated time, Joseph Veach Noble (then Head of Education at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and later to become President of the American Association of Museums) wrote that the purpose of the museum is “to collect, to conserve, to study, to interpret and to exhibit.” These, he said, “are like the five fingers of a hand, each independent, but united for a common purpose.”¹

If one defines the museum largely as the first three fingers of the hand, its history is linked to that of the collection, and the museum has its roots in the Classical past. The earliest museum of which we can speak was actually a library: the mousseion of Alexandria, the institutional sibling of the famous library that flourished three centuries before Christ. Since the Renaissance, the dominant model of the museum has been the collection, and the demands of the collection have taken precedence in the museum’s organization. 

If one puts the emphasis on the last two fingers, the museum’s history can be traced to the late 18th century. By the end of the 18th century, the political situation was extremely volatile, and the demands for access to social, political and cultural machinery found decisive political expression. Following the French Revolution in 1789, the very existence of private collections was called into question. Out of the passionate defense of the need for collections to the Convention of 1793 and 1794, the first modern museums were born: the Louvre, the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, and the Musée des arts et métiers.  

Regardless of which of the fingers is emphasized, it is clear that much of the museum’s core mission—and its core values—have to do with preserving the traces of culture over the very long term. Moreover, since the French Revolution, museums have been seen as a resource to supplement the formal education system. Now, forced increasingly to position themselves as exhibition halls, museums are being exhorted to become an extension of the “leisure industry”—on the assumption that entertainment, after all, should be self-financing. Alternatively, museums are being pressured to play an active and activist role in redressing social and economic inequalities. This repositioning raises some fundamental questions.

 

Is The Museum Entertainment?

First of all, is the museum really part of the “leisure industry?” The assumptions that underlie this assertion are two-fold. First, that museums have a product, something that is made in some kind of quasi–industrial process, and second, that as part of an industry, we are only one of a multitude of other producers of similar goods—in this case, something called “leisure” or “recreation.” We thereby unwittingly end up as soulmates with electronic games, swimming, going to the cinema, and curling up with a good book. I would argue that it is very difficult to define the museum “product”—is it enjoyment? Learning? Enlightenment? and even harder to define the process whereby museums create the product—our objects? Our labels? Our cafés? Is it all just “leisure?” 

Second, if the museum is in fact competing for the precious discretionary time of the visitor, with whom is the museum competing and for what? Competition only realistically can be said to exist if there are limited resources and real choices. If I have only ten dollars (or Euro), I must choose how to spend it. The more wealth I have, the less choices come into conflict—the less they compete. If I can buy a watch, a diamond ring, and fly to New York for the weekend, where is the competition?  

Competition also assumes that products or services are interchangeable, and are distinguished only by cost, quality, and occasional intangibles. I can choose between Garrard and Cartier when I buy a diamond ring—they are in competition. I can choose to fly to New York with Virgin Atlantic or with Air India—they are in competition. But when a product or service is irreplaceable, where is the competition? When a unique Stradivarius comes on the market at Christie’s, or if I want Luciano Pavarotti to sing Ave Maria at my wedding, competition disappears. Where does the museum fit in all this? Do museum visitors have so little discretionary time that the museum must compete for it with ever bigger, ever flashier exhibitions? Are all museums somehow equal, and therefore in competition? I would argue that the answer is no on both counts.  

The logic of competition holds only if we imagine our visitors with a limited amount of time to spend, and little chance to return—if we think our visitors are tourists. In this case, the logic of the market prevails. If you only have three days and eighty possible museums to choose from, even the casehardened cultural tourist will be able to tackle no more than a dozen of them. But does placing our emphasis on the occasional tourist visitor—at the cost of treating the regular local user like a tourist—make sense? Does it help us build better museums, richer informal learning environments, activities that require engagement, commitment, and continuity? I would argue strongly that as museum professionals we must stop thinking in terms of visitors and instead think in terms of users—repeat visitors who can learn the skills necessary to truly take advantage of the rich environments we provide. Of course it is not a case of either/or; however, for far too long the discourse has been dominated by those who see everything in terms of the one-time, occasional visit. 

There is a signal difference between the cultures of Europe and North America in the discussion about competition. In nearly all aspects of museum work, the dialogue has been shaped by North American concerns, concerns arising largely from a pioneer culture, which sees only individuals, at the expense of other forms of social behavior. Competition is seen as a function of individual choices, and between isolated institutions. But surely one of the lessons of museums is that museum-going as a cultural practice is often as much social as individual—people come to discuss their experiences, to compare notes, to be with friends. It follows then that choices about museum-going are often choices made with others—with family, friends, groups—which makes it even more likely that it is the practice that is endorsed, not the individual museum. Only if we are blinded by the rhetoric of the marketplace, in which individual choices are made by individual actors, can we make the mistake of thinking our museums truly compete for their individual leisure time.

 

How Educational Is The Museum? 

So if the museum is not to be defined as part of the “leisure industry,” in which it would find itself playing—and losing—by the rules of the entertainment market, where should it belong? Museum expert Kenneth Hudson was intolerant of museums that shamelessly took advantage of the generosity of the public purse by not taking seriously their mission to serve the public. A museum had to be paid for—and money didn’t just fall from the sky. “A museum has to have money in order to survive. And where is that money going to come from? The money will come, directly or indirectly, from the people who come to see the museums.”² Or put another way, “It comes from the taxes paid by poor widows.”³ But if not entertainment, surely the museum can make a claim on the widows’ taxes as a legitimate and traditional part of the national education system. 

One of the first public museums, the Musée français, (later called the Musée du Louvre), was a creation of the Convention of 1793, and was originally the repository of the fruits of the confiscation of works of art from the church and the aristocracy during the Revolution. Under the Directoire, the museum’s collections were organized systematically according to “schools,” and most importantly, explanatory texts were placed with each work of art. In addition to explanatory texts, the Louvre, following its initial vocation as “the people’s museum,” was open to the public free of charge, published a guide for visitors and sold an inexpensive catalogue. The Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle was created primarily from the Cabinet du roi and the Jardin des plantes by the Convention of 1794. Lamarck was outspoken about the needs of those who were excluded from the cabinets, and went on to enunciate one of the fundamental principles of the modern museum: public admission: “The museum should not only be open to the public during the afternoon, that is to say during the hours when passers-by and idle folk seek some relief from boredom, but during the morning as well, that time of the day so particularly intended for travail, above all in investigations relative to the sciences.”  

Thus the arguments for founding museums were linked to their ability to teach new skills, not just convey information about the distant past or amuse idle time-wasters. Justifying the creation of the Musée des arts et métiers, one of the first museums of applied arts, the Abbé Gregoire summarized his proposal to the Convention by saying “I have just disclosed to you the means of developing the national industry.” The educational objectives of the Conservatory were clear from the outset—faced with a substantial delay in catching up with English industry, apprentices were to be routinely brought to the Conservatory to study machines and working models of machines, in order to speedily make up the French deficit in technology. Moreover, the Conservatory became the depot of record for all inventions patented in France, the repository of the history of France’s entry into the industrial world. The Convention was convinced, and the Conservatoire des arts et métiers in Paris was created on September 26th, 1794.  

Since at least the heady days of the Convention, the museum has had an explicit educational mission. The museum was an integral part of social, cultural and economic policy, and was intended to provide the opportunity for a broad public to participate in the cultural capital of the growing state. The museum’s collections were at once an act of preservation, and an investment in the future. Adjuncts to the formal education system of schools and universities, the museum’s collections were a resource to be used by students, scholars and amateurs alike. In this respect, the nature of the museum’s educational mission has not really changed significantly over the past centuries, and the museum’s mission is still to excite, inspire and enlighten the minds of its users.

 

What Education For Whom?

What has changed dramatically in the post-war decades, however, are the assumptions about the nature of the education that the museum is expected to provide, and the audience to whom it will be provided. On the one hand, under pressure by interests on both left and right of the political spectrum to increase access to a much broader spectrum of society than that assumed by museum founders, museums are increasingly confronted with visitors whose ability to take advantage of the museum as an educational resource is limited. On the other hand, however, in claiming to be an educational resource, rather than a feature on the entertainment landscape, the museum is confronted by a dilemma.

Can it remain haughty and aloof from the obvious needs of its new visitors for new information—ever the ivory tower? If so, how can it justify its generous subsidy from the public purse? In many Western countries the government subsidy is now tied directly to the museum’s ability to serve “under-served” audiences. Or does it resign itself to accepting the role of offering remedial education to those who are not able to enjoy the museum’s collections? The shift in the museum’s educational priorities has been from supplementary education, whereby the museum serving as a resource, to remedial education, whereby the museum teaches the skills necessary to understand its collections.  

Perhaps an illustration will help understand the importance of this shift. Let us take the library as our example. Its mission is relatively stable, and in many regards it is similar to the traditional museum. The library collects, preserves, studies and occasionally interprets its collections. Unlike the museum, however, books are rarely displayed for the purpose of exhibition; instead, it is expected that they be arranged and organized in order to help those who can read them. People rarely go to a library just to look around, nor do they exclaim “nice-looking books. I love books!”  

The library is a different kind of institution, but like the museum it supports learning about the world and understanding the culture in which we live. In fact, many things that one does in libraries we would love to have people doing in our museums. But we have a very different model—libraries think in terms of users, whereas museums most commonly conceive of their public in terms of visitors. What would happen if the library responded to financial and economic pressure in the same way as the museum in the past decades? 

Imagine the following. A library has low but stable numbers of users, a loyal group of locals who come regularly to the library to read, browse and borrow. Under pressure from the public administration to ensure greater accessibility and attract new audiences, the library administration decides to put its books of Greek poetry on display in a special exhibition, Greece having newly joined the European Union. Visitors come, drawn by the rarity of the books and their expensive bindings, richly tooled in gold and jewels. Further exhibitions are mounted, featuring even costlier and more rare books. Few visitors, however, read Greek.  

The library’s education department protests against the static book displays, unreadable by the majority of the library’s new visitors, and develops new “hands-on” experiences to introduce visitors to the basics of the Greek alphabet. Seeing the success of the experiment (children drawing Greek-looking squiggles, adults discussing olive oil), the library decides to create a new IMAX theatre experience on the joys of Greek culture, necessitating the removal of the library’s book collections. Given the crowds that come to the IMAX theatre (designed by a famous Greek architect), the reading rooms are closed to make way for visitor parking…⁴ 

Although rarely commented upon, the shift in emphasis—and in mission—has important consequences. In the library example above, instead of being a resource for users to supplement their self-initiated and self-directed enquiries, it has become a place for visitors to be entertained and (perhaps) instructed. The library is no longer a place for readers; it is a place for non-readers.  

On the one hand, if we accept that the library (or museum) is a place for entertainment, for “flânerie,” then there is no reason why the institution should not compete on its own terms in the entertainment market. Why should it receive a subsidy from the state? Or in Kenneth Hudson’s words, why should the institution be financed from widows’ taxes?  

On the other hand, if we argue that the institution is a site for education in any meaningful sense, then we are forced to weigh the costs of providing that education (both in terms of one time capital costs and operating costs) and its effectiveness. This is where the change in the nature of the educational experience begins to matter. As a resource the library can be justified in terms of its use to readers. However, as an instrument of remedial education—a place in which one learns to read—it is clear that the few hours a year spent in the library could in no way justify the large capital investment and the high operating costs. It is even to be strongly doubted whether the library could—or should—play such a role at all. With little effort, it can be seen that the same argument applies to the museum.

 

The Cost Of Chasing Visitors

 Notwithstanding the importance of the “affective” or emotional impact of the museum visit,⁵ several museum visitor studies suggest that most museum visitors come three times in a lifetime⁶—as a child (often in a school class), as a young parent, and as a grandparent.⁷ This general pattern is of course mitigated to some extent by what the tourist industry calls VFF—Visiting Family and Friends—so when your sister-in-law drops in with the kids, or your school chum passes through town for the weekend, a trip to the museum might be the perfect way to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon. While it is true that schoolchildren often come more frequently, depending on the museum’s outreach programs, these visits are often compulsory, and cannot be credited to the museum’s attraction as an informal setting. 

However, notwithstanding VFF, and school visits, this three-visit pattern tends to force the museum to create temporary exhibitions as a means of generating repeat visits. In fact, the modern temporary exhibition is a creature born out of a desire to increase the number of visitors. In the 70s the great “blockbuster” exhibitions such as King Tut proved that the exhibition could be a major money-earner, as well as a sure generator of extra visitors. However, without change to generate repeat visits, or an influx of new visitors, the number of visits inevitably declines. The museum’s allure is increasingly that of a stadium—people visit only to see a specific event.  

Paradoxically, however, increased visitor numbers impair the ability to deliver the high quality engagement that is at the heart of the museum experience. Large numbers of visitors shorten and degrade every individual’s ability to engage with the exhibits, and, when international tourists make up the bulk of the visitors, the local community is squeezed out almost entirely.⁸ And, if the museum expands to meet the increased demand, it incurs increased operating costs that only make the problem worse. The museum—an unwieldy beast at best—ends up being unable to feed its increasingly heavy bulk. 

To increase their earned revenue, many museums have increased their reliance on tourist visits. The Louvre estimates that over 70% of its visitors are international tourists, the Van Gogh Museum, over 80%. But building a financial strategy on one-time tourist visits comes at a high price—that of vulnerability. During the IRA attacks in London in the 80s, tourist visits to London museums plummeted, and the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11th highlighted the vulnerability of the museum to shifts in tourist behavior. Celestine Bohlen reported on the dramatic impact of September 11th on New York’s Guggenheim Museum.

 

The Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY

“Hard times have come to the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue, and like the good times before them, they have hit big. Admissions are down by almost 60 percent, revenue is running about half of what it is supposed to be, and as of Friday 80 employees—roughly one-fifth of the staff—had been given pink slips in what [the Guggenheim’s Director] Mr. Krens described as the initial round of layoffs. Besides the staff cuts, which reportedly may reach 40 percent, the museum has scaled back its exhibit schedule, postponing exhibitions by Matthew Barney and Kasimir Malevich. Its SoHo museum on Prince Street will close at the end of the year, and the fate of its $20 million Web site, guggenheim.com, is still unclear. …Ever the showman, Mr. Krens has now cast himself as a model of fiscal responsibility. “I think it is appropriate for an institute to re-examine its core mission,” he said. … But that has also made the Guggenheim more vulnerable to the fickle tides of New York tourism. Of the museum’s one million visitors a year, almost 70 percent are from out of town, and 50 percent are from abroad, Mr. Krens said. In addition the Guggenheim is more reliant than most museums on admission fees, which account for 25 percent of total revenue, compared with 12 percent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its critics see this as a weakness in his management approach. “They were forced into being a cash machine,” said one director of a New York museum who asked not to be identified because he did not want to be seen as criticizing a rival.⁹ 

This is the crisis many museums are now facing. Having built a financial strategy based on attracting one-time visits—mostly tourists—by creating spectacular “blockbuster” exhibitions, the museums have created an expectation of museum-visiting that turns the museum into a stadium. As a consequence, the museum is forced on the one hand to continue to mount expensive temporary exhibitions that eclipse interest in their permanent collections, while on the other hand they remain vulnerable to influences on visitor behavior—from changes in taste to terrorist attacks. The core mission of the museum—to collect, preserve, study, interpret and exhibit its own collections—is rendered secondary to the imperatives of bringing in the crowds. The tail is now wagging the dog.

 

Piazza Or Stadium?

We have seen above how the model of the stadium—event-driven, one-time, short-term—acts in the long term to reduce real use of the museum. What other models could we look to? What other social spaces offer a model for repeat use by a broad spectrum of the public?  

From its earliest beginnings, the model of the library has also been part of the museum’s history. In many respects, the library model offers far more opportunities. A library is local, rooted to its community of users—and global, in terms of the resources it makes available. As a resource center, it can serve its users in a wide variety of ways. A library is not exhausted by a visit; on the contrary, it is refreshed by it. Europe also has a long tradition of public places, and the model of the Italian piazza springs readily to mind. A piazza is defined by the variety of possibilities it offers, by the range of possible activities, and by its use by young and old. The use of a piazza is entirely “bottom-up.” You can sit in the sun and drink a coffee, talk to your friends, play with your grandchildren, window shop—everything is possible in a piazza.

 

A piazza in Florence

 

Like the library and the piazza, the museum always had an important social role. We know from the research of Marilyn Hood¹⁰ and others that for the majority of museum visitors, it is precisely this public physical space that is one of the central motivations for visiting. The majority of museum visitors come in groups, and the museum space is not only a social space—a place where people meet and mingle—but a socializing space, a place where they learn the skills of public interaction. If the street is “a room by agreement,” as Louis Kahn once said,¹¹ surely the museum is a house by agreement. A museum can also be seen—and developed—as a special kind of piazza.  

But to function as a piazza it must also enlarge the range of activities it offers, and be prepared to see the experience of its own collections as only a part of a social activity that also includes eating, drinking, talking, and shopping. The collections must be developed to create a sort of intellectual “park” in which users can wander in a landscape of objects and ideas. Research has amply demonstrated that the majority of museum visitors come for—and remember best—the social interaction of the visit. It follows therefore that a museum must strive to increase the number of opportunities for a rich and varied social experience. The more a museum defines itself as a piazza, the greater the number and the greater the variety of its users.

 

The Numbers Game

But is the key to success—and its measure—only to be found in increased visitor numbers? Unfortunately, museums and their directors have often accepted uncritically the American rhetoric about the museum mission, and, as a consequence, have accepted the argument that the museum’s future depends on ever increasing visitor numbers. Museums, Kenneth Hudson once said ruefully, “have become victims of the equation, better = more, and they have adopted policies which they believe could bring them the extra visitors which… their employers are driving them to find. They dare not wonder whether going for popular appeal will lessen or even destroy quality.”¹² This new popularity—or at least increased visitor numbers—in turn depends upon blockbuster exhibitions, and increasingly on new museum buildings. Over the past three decades, museum buildings—not the museums and their collections—have become the means by which museums compete with one another for tourist visits.¹³ This logic is clearly spelled out in a recent article about the Victoria and Albert Museum’s expansion plans in the New York Times. Here it is suggested that the failing visitor numbers are the consequence of the museum’s collections (the best in the world) and the remedy in a new extension by a “signature architect.” 

 

The Tate Modern

 

In his article on the museum dilemma, Alan Riding drives the point home:  

What is clear, however, is that with certain notable exceptions such as the Centre Pompidou, the visitor numbers generated by new buildings start to drop off after the third year—the well–documented S-curve, and in the case of some museums, the drop in visitor numbers can be vertiginous.¹⁶ At the same time, new buildings often bring substantially increased operating costs in terms of overhead, maintenance, and staff. Increased operating costs combined with drastically reduced visitor revenue can injure —or even kill—a new institution,¹⁷ and paralyze an older one.¹⁸ Following its billion-dollar expansion, the Louvre, for example, is forced to keep over 25% of its collections closed to the public due to the high cost of extra staff.¹⁹

 

The Louvre

 

Nor is building new museums in and of itself is the answer to revitalizing a city or a neighborhood. A new museum building will bring visitors to an area on a one-time basis, generating interest that generally peaks after three years, depending on the size of the potential visitor pool. If the operational costs of the museum are not adequately funded in the long term, new museum building is urban suicide. Even the Bilbao effect—once a byword for urban regeneration—will soon be a symbol of the failure of short term urban planning. The once full flights are even now fewer, cancelled for lack of interest in seeing the same exhibitions that the international visitor has already seen in New York, Berlin or Venice. Those who wished to see Gehry’s architectural wonder have largely done so. What will remain is a forlorn outpost of the McGuggenheim, its titanium petals rusting in the Spanish sun, its exhibition halls empty.²⁰ 

The museum I recently directed is a good example of the short-sightedness of museum building without considering its long-term sustainability. For the first few years, the Museum für Kunsthandwerk (as it was called from 1935–2000) basked in the sun of public attention due to its world-renowned Richard Meier architecture. The visitors came in droves, from both Frankfurt and abroad, largely to see the new building—an architectural landmark. The Director responsible for guiding Meier’s work retired in 1987. By 1989, with the only change being in the form of temporary exhibitions, visitor numbers had fallen predictably (following the S-curve), although the quality of the Museum’s exhibitions continued to draw a loyal local following.  

Unfortunately, in 1994, the City began to feel the pinch of their generous support of the cultural sector (at its peak, Frankfurt’s cultural budget exceeded the cultural budget for all of Holland). Abruptly the money supply was turned off. Exhibition projects went unfunded, positions went unfilled, building maintenance went undone. For the first time, Frankfurt’s museums had to charge admission, but this brought in no more than 10% of the amount slashed from the budget, and as a consequence the visitor numbers halved again. Not surprisingly, given the double impact of diminishing value and increased prices, visitor numbers plummeted. To this date, the museum has no City budget for exhibitions, education, publications, or publicity.²¹

 

Building A Time Bomb 

Unfortunately, the tyranny of the S-curve means regular crises due to the novelty wearing off. Exhibitions create an S-curve in the year’s visitor patterns, and a new building creates a longer-term problem. The truth appears to be that the market for new museums is largely saturated, and new buildings only temporarily mask an overall decline in museum use. Despite rising wages and standard of living, which continue to swell the ranks of the middle classes able to afford museum visits, the pool of regular museum visitors seems to be growing slowly if at all. Moreover, despite the large numbers of visitors, they are not spread equally over all museums, but tend to favor the larger museums located in major tourist meccas. Even they are not exempt, as Alan Riding reported, 

Operating costs are at the heart of the museum time bomb. The capital costs of new buildings are substantial, and it is a rare project that is not over budget. These costs, however, are normally paid for by one-time contributions from private donors, sponsors, or the state. In Britain, dozens of projects have been financed in the past years by means of the Lottery Fund. However, large buildings require larger staff, and incur substantially higher operating costs. These costs are rarely, if ever, taken into consideration by private or civic funders—on the contrary, the Lottery Fund expressly excludes operating subsidies from its grants.  

This means that institutions are required to demonstrate that the increased operating costs will be paid for by revenue. Most new institutions (and many older ones) argue optimistically that this increased revenue will be supplied by the increased visitor numbers that stream into the newly built institution. Unfortunately, museum work suffers from “Baumol’s disease,” whereby increased use of technology does not bring with it a corresponding increase in productivity. This means that as wages increase to keep up with inflation, the museum’s operating costs become inexorably more expensive. This is not a case of public sector inefficiency, just economics (most public sector work is afflicted). 

As seen from the above, the evidence is less than encouraging. After the initial burst of popularity, visitor numbers inevitably decline, leaving the new institution starved for the cash desperately needed to renew facilities and attract new revenue. At best, the institution can limp along for a few years. At worst, the institution faces bankruptcy. In both cases the state is faced with the prospect of either refinancing the institution, or letting it go bust. In the first instance, this means an extra burden on the state’s finances, which are already under pressure from an ageing population, high unemployment and the need to renew the ageing infrastructure. In the second instance, bankruptcy is seen as throwing away a substantial investment. In reality, the course commonly adopted is to provide an additional injection of one-time funds conditional on becoming self-sufficient in a given time frame. All this does, however, is to emasculate the institution further, and push it further away from its initial mission. In either case, what remains is a building; another monument to short-sighted planning. 

Based on the American experience, Michael Kimmerman puts the danger of the dilution of the museum’s mission succinctly: 

At the same time, arguments for the museum’s educational mission, while valid, seem out of proportion to the enormous costs of new building and large staff. With inner-city schools under-funded, it is difficult to justify a new museum with even the most ambitious educational outreach programs on the basis of twice-yearly visits to the museum.

 

Are Museums Sustainable? 

Today’s museums are in a quandary. On the one hand, if they are to compete against other “leisure activities” they are at a disadvantage due to high capital costs, high operating costs and often inflexible management structures. Few if any museums are 100% revenue financed, and there is little evidence that in the free market visitors would be prepared to pay the true value of providing even the best “blockbuster” exhibitions if all the costs were factored in. On the other hand, if museums are to be financed from the public purse, they must demonstrate their value in terms of providing educational opportunities for those identified by the state as key target audiences. This too is problematic, given the high costs of the museum and the relatively little time any visitor spends.  

Museum directors are justifiably confused by what they see as a choice between two equally untenable alternatives. As Michael Kimmerman wrote in the New York Times after the Salzburg Conference in 2001: “But what else would you expect? As Mr. Harris put it: ‘Museum directors could legitimately claim bewilderment at being told, simultaneously, to avoid the public trough and stand on their own two feet, but not to resemble too closely the commercial world that, after all, had to show a profit.’ ” 

The new populism has increased the mythology of attendance. How do museums prove their worthiness to corporate and government sponsors today? By drawing more people through the turnstiles, and more kinds of people. Those with the purse strings demand it. Peter Weibl, the director of a museum in Graz, Austria, specializing in electronic art, talked at the seminar about the illogic of this concept. Attendance is considered a measure of public service by funders, government funders especially, who, without thinking the issue through, simply figure that the more people who visit museums, the more public-minded the museums must be, never mind that attendance has nothing necessarily to do with enlightenment. Museums, having therefore been instructed that success is to be measured by attendance numbers, then organize Monet and van Gogh shows, which guarantee big box-office returns, so they can declare themselves successful. The tautology is absurd.  

The question should not be how many people visit museums but how valuable are their visits. Attendance at a museum is different from attendance at a ballpark or a movie. Partly the difference is that baseball and Hollywood are for-profit businesses while museums are educational institutions, although the more people the merrier at museums; to borrow a useful turn of phrase, museums are equal-opportunity elitists. But museums have not yet learned how to measure precisely the quality of the experience they offer—what their visitors are getting out of their visits aside from gifts in the gift shop and sandwiches in the cafeteria. The Getty Trust sponsored some expensive interviews in the 1990s, asking what visitors liked about museums, which displays they found instructive, what kinds of promotion worked better than others. But those were preliminary studies. Time and again in Salzburg, curators and directors talked about the need to boost attendance, which was almost all the time, the question that hung in the air was, “money aside, to what end?”²⁴ 

It is clearly time to “bell the cat” and declare that in their present form, most museums are not sustainable.²⁵ The museum market is over-saturated, the operating costs are high relative to earned revenue, and productivity (however defined) cannot be enhanced by one-time infusions of technology. Most vulnerable are middle-aged, middle-sized institutions that are unable to generate sufficient operating revenue to remain attractive to the visiting public, thus slowly suffocating for lack of visitors and funding. As long as public funding continues to decrease—a likely scenario given the increasing demands on the public purse and decreasing revenue—museums must face a future where their survival depends on earned revenue. 

It is clear that the worldwide trend is away from state support for the museum sector, a defection that will soon turn into a rout due to the demands on the public purse of an ageing population. So is the answer to privatize? If so, what does such a privatization mean? Recently the Italian government announced plans to privatize its museums, although what it meant was not spelled out. Melinda Henneberger writes “Mr. Berger, who was in charge of merchandising at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, was hired as a consultant here in 1993 to bring modern marketing techniques to Italy. […] He said the partial privatization was no threat to Italian art: ‘Private isn’t only General Motors. And American museums are private not-for-profit already. In Britain it’s a mix of private and public, and in France it’s run by the state. The Italian way will help alleviate a burden the state just can’t handle any more.’ ”²⁶ 

As Berger notes above, there is a range of models to choose from, from wholly private, earned revenue-financed museums to not-for-profit foundations fully supported by an endowment. What is clear, however, is that without breaking free from its dependence on public sector funding, many medium-sized museums are doomed to eventual extinction. On the other hand, the vagaries of the market mean that total reliance on earned revenue or private funding is also an extremely shaky foundation on which to build the museum’s future.  

The solution, it would seem from the American experience, lies in a form of the endowment fund—investments in stocks, bonds or real estate that bring a return on investment that can be used to support the museum’s activities. This fund can be created by private patronage or public munificence. In fact, to be sustainable, it is imperative that the museum’s funding streams always remain diversified—earned revenue, sponsorship, private donations, grants from all levels of government, European, national, provincial and municipal. What is essential is that the fund (or foundation) be autonomous, and that its revenue, however meager, not be at risk from the vagaries of further private or public decisions. Even an endowment fund has inherent risks. The market may underperform, meaning that the revenue from the endowment is reduced from one year to the next. Even more dangerous is the practice of withdrawing money from the endowment to pay for operating costs—a practice usually strongly discouraged by the endowment’s board. 

Nevertheless, some museums succumb to the temptation. In the case of the Guggenheim, “the museum’s endowment has declined in recent years, from $55.6 million in 1998, to $38.9 million at the end of 2001. An endowment consists of savings that produce interest and should not be spent. While donors have continued to write checks to the Guggenheim’s endowment, Krens has regularly dipped into it, mainly to cover operating expenses.”²⁷ This may have appeared an acceptable risk in the heady boom times of the 1990s; in the bear market of the first years of the 21st century, it appears to be suicidal folly.

 

The Future Of Museums 

The future of museums looks grim. The museum is overdrawn, and it is not clear where the much-needed revenue should come from. Forced into a market where it cannot compete, the museum is forced to overtrade, using scarce resources to chase after a dismayingly wide range of possible revenue sources. Seduced into thinking that bigger is better and that growth is the key to health, the museum is overcrowded, thus destroying the very essence of the museum experience, and undermining the ability to use the museum to bring visitors into contact with masterpieces of culture. So what is the future of our museums? If they cannot survive from earned revenue, nor depend any longer on public funding, how should our institutions respond? I would argue that the answer is a mix of several strategies. 

First, museums must scale down their ambitions and resist the temptation to confuse growth with health. By restricting its activities to its “core business,” operating costs can also be substantially reduced. Many medium-sized municipal museums remain under-visited—large warehouses of city treasures, poorly maintained and understaffed. Often these same museums pay a large premium just to keep the doors open to snag the few hundred visitors who might wander in on a rainy weekday. But must all museums be open to all the public all the time? Certain museums with a specialist public, rather than chasing increased visitor numbers to cover high operating costs, might do well to consider being open on an appointment only basis, or one day a week. Many cities were caught up in the museum-building frenzy of the 1980s and 90s, vying to outdo one another with potlatch-like displays of municipal largesse. In the lean years of the early 21st century, perhaps some of these museums can be consolidated, their collections joined with the consequence of greater rotation and greater perceived change? In the museum “market,” surely some museums should be allowed to swallow others, while still others become extinct?  

Second, the museum must aim at achieving institutional independence, and to ensuring its long term financial health based on an endowed Foundation model, supported by a mix of sources, without becoming dependent on any single revenue stream. Whether a small community museum or a large tourist destination, the museum can survive only as long as it is managed as an autonomous whole. This means that all the key factors on which the museum stands or falls—an articulated vision, a motivated staff, and a sustainable financial strategy—must be able coordinated within a single, coherent, transparent administrative framework. Museums where the administration is separated from the leadership, where financial decisions are taken independently from personnel decisions, where political influences shape the policies the museum must adopt—are destined to be structurally weak, ineffective, and fraught with inevitable conflicts of interest.²⁸ Even the Louvre is not exempt—“in a recent interview with the weekly magazine L’Express, Mr. Loyrette said the financial squeeze had forced him to cut his conservation budget by 25 percent and to cancel or postpone several temporary exhibitions. […] Mr. Loyrette told Le Monde that he ‘very largely shared’ the conclusions of the Cour des Comptes [highly critical of the Louvre’s dependence on the French Ministry of Culture]. ‘The difficulties described in the report are all the more explicable because they are structural,’ he said. ‘They are a product of the tutelage exercised over the Louvre.’ ”²⁹ The importance of operational autonomy and a transparent decision-making structure cannot be underestimated as a key factor in the museum’s to ability respond flexibly to change. Moreover, the better managed the museum, the more likely that it can fulfill the promises it makes to the many stakeholders necessary to support the museum’s activities. 

Third, the museum should return to a focus on its core values—Veach’s “five fingers”—in the interests of generating a slowly growing base of users, not onetime visitors. It should look to the library—or the piazza—to provide a model of use, not just one-time visits. In the ecology of museums, each museum should be encouraged to find its “niche.” Those who have well-trained and motivated educational staff should use them to advantage to create programs for the schools, those over-stocked with scholars should research and publish. Kenneth Hudson always argued that the museum was in fact more like a private club than a disco, and that its ambitions should remain modest, and its financial health based on its membership base—its users. I would also argue that a museum’s future is also based on its specificity—its collections. Like a library, a museum is a resource, which should serve a broad base of interested and informed users. Like a piazza, it is a place that should sustain the broadest possible range of activities related to the experience and enjoyment of the museum’s collections. 

As Michael Kimmerman wrote recently in the New York Times, 

This sounds obvious but evidently isn’t. It entails less equivocation, less democracy, less blurring of the line between commerce and content, and a reassertion of authority on the part of museums, which must restate their convictions about esoteric beauty, the ethical import of aesthetics and the special, if intangible, power of the things they possess. The goal is not for every museum to become another Frick. It is to use the excellent new tools available—technological, didactic—to become more effective and more affecting places. Between the university and Disneyland is not a morass of compromise but a realm of rational entertainment, a concept harking back to the Enlightenment. Rational entertainment requires a standard of quality on the part of museums. Quality has become a dirty word, an antidemocratic concept, according to museum critics, but quality, and the ability to explain it eloquently, are still what separate museums from shopping malls. Museums need to reclaim the idea of quality because it is what people want when they go to museums: to be told what they should value, so that they can then decide for themselves whether or not to agree—which is how a free democracy really works. Standards change, values evolve, but without them at any given moment, we are lost.³⁰ 

The museum must return to its core values, and deliver on its core skills. The museum must be home to collections and to learning from those collections. The museum ‘is a place where one learns that the life of the mind is a pleasure’ in the words of Jonathan Miller, ‘an institution for the prevention of blindness’ according to Nelson Goodman, ‘a permanent storage battery’ for Sherman Lee. The museum must look towards the creation of ‘lightweight,’ flexible projects that take advantage of the museum’s unique collections, not heavyweight blockbusters that disrupt the priorities of the museum and distort the identity of the museum. In the future, the museum must return to being a learning hub—not a ‘destination attraction.’ Then, and only then, will museums be sustainable and remain a vital societal resource—a multi-facetted piazza for the learning society.

 

Notes 

Dr. James M. Bradburne, AADipl MCSD, was formerly Director General of Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He currently is Director of The Next Generation Foundation, based in Slough, Berkshire, UK. He may be reached at jamesb@xs4all.nl.