Arts consultant Adrian Ellis suggests a more balanced and ecological approach to museum revenue discussions, beyond the rhetoric of the Boston MFA deal with Las Vegas, or the Barnes Collection struggles with de-accessioning (selling off pieces from the collection) to remain solvent. According to Ellis, all such conversations are cut from a common cloth:
There is a difference between renting your collection and selling bits of it. But the motives are the same: finding a way through the dilemmas of the sector‹overbuilt and undercapitalised; cash-poor, but asset-rich; with a high ratio of fixed to variable costs‹that threatens core purposes of stewardship, scholarship and effective public display.
Instead of ranting and shaking fingers, Ellis suggests, the museum world could benefit from more of a community spirit, that would ‘allow for a more rational distribution of resources between cash-poor asset-rich institutions and cash-rich asset-poor ones.’
It’s another great example of the benefits of broad, systemic alternatives to our current organizationally-focused approaches to issues in the arts. We can either continue to separate, protect, and defend our organizational turf, or actually advance our missions and goals in greater collaboration with our peers.
As Ben Franklin said as he signed the Declaration of Independence: ‘We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.’
