Andrew Taylor on the Business of Arts & Culture
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Dancing at the edge of nonprofit
Posted: November 19, 2007
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The New York Times has a story on the increasingly permeable boundary between nonprofit museums and for-profit galleries that represent the artists shown within them (also covered by my blog neighbor CultureGrrl). At issue is a series of recent museum exhibits, where the galleries representing the exhibited artists provided significant financial and logistical support. Asks the article:
Should nonprofit art museums accept money from commercial galleries with a clear financial stake in the artist's career, and in some cases in the artworks on display? More generally, can the willingness of galleries to pony up subtly influence what a museum sets out to exhibit?
The artistic leadership of these exhibits claim that requests for support followed their decision to mount the show, rather than preceded it. Others point to the rising costs and diminishing resources that make such support necessary to mounting a show at all. The tension only underscores the fact that for-profit and nonprofit cultural enterprise are (and have always been) entirely interrelated, and the influence across that invisible boundary is more a matter of degree and perception than absolute separation.
According to Bruce Altshuler, director of the museum studies program at New York University, the important questions regarding such gallery/museum relationships boil down to two:
''Was the decision to mount the exhibition made because of funding from someone with an economic interest in the show? And did that funding lead to the ceding of curatorial decision making or some influence on the choice of works in the exhibition?''
Let the rationalizations begin...