The real story of the week: Free-fall at the DIA

While some newspapers have been gallivanting about the globe spending big dollars and daily attention on vacuous entertainment-meets-business stories such as the Hirst auction, the most important arts journalism of the week comes from Mark Stryker in today's Detroit Free Press: The Detroit Institute of Arts, one of America's finest museums, is facing major financial problems. Stryker reports that the DIA is facing a staggering FY 2009 operating budget shortfall of $17 million on operating expenses of $34 million. [Image: A DIA Degas.]

Stryker does a nice job of outlining the factors that have gone into DIA's troubles: macro-economic problems in Detroit and in Michigan, years of operating shortfalls that have been covered by depriving the museum's endowment of roughly $100 million, and a massive decline in government support. He also outlines how the museum hopes to fix the problem -- and the plans sound mighty thin.

The DIA story certainly has particulars rooted in problems in Michigan, where unemployment is at nine percent. (The national figure is 6.1 percent.) In metro Detroit it's even higher -- 10 percent -- and in the city itself the figure is over 14 percent. (Compounding the hurt: In Detroit consumer prices are up five percent in the last year.) The Michigan economy is so strained that not even the beloved Detroit Red Wings sold out playoff games during their recent run to the Stanley Cup.

But what's happening at the DIA is also part of an under-examined macro-narrative: During the first peak period of American museums, then-wealthy cities in America's industrial belt supported great collections and museums. Many of the finest art objects in America are in museums in Detroit, Toledo, Dayton, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Rochester, NY. [Image: A DIA Van Gogh.]

But over the last couple decades the rust belt economy has suffered, and those cities have faced economic stagnation or recession. This past summer, a report from the U.S. Census Bureau showed that cities such as Dayton and Buffalo lost as much as seven percent of their population just last year. (Meanwhile, population is booming in the sun belt, a region with few great museums.) When Buffalo's Albright-Knox looked at its ability to stay relevant as a contemporary art museum, it decided it had to deaccession art in order to be able to continue to acquire art.

And now the DIA is in trouble. They won't be the last rust belt museum to struggle.