The Milwaukee Journal Sentinal featured a few articles on the Milwaukee Art Museum (one on the finances, one on new director David Gordon). Both articles addressed the museum’s challenging combination of an over-budget signature building and the ‘perfect storm’ of revenue problems facing most arts organizations these days (lower enrollment/admissions, strapped government funding, ‘right-sizing’ corporations and sponsorship, poor current economics for usually generous donors, equity losses on endowments, etc.).
The combined stories also led Mr. Gordon to post a response on ArtsJournal.com, reinforcing that the organization was doing just fine.
For me, the on-going public conversation about the new building and its cost/operating implications raises three main issues:
- The first is that cultural facilities are political buildings by their nature. They often boldly define, in a very public way, what a community stands for, strives for, and hopes to be. The public naturally has a lot ot say about that.
- The second issue is that cultural facilities, as art forms, are some of the most complex that modern civilization produces — made not just from creative insight, bricks, and mortar, but from cash, debt, public finance, power, politics, and management savvy. Although often defined by its celebrity architect and his/her vision, a cultural facility is realized by a collective energy and forged by a collective will.
- Finally, I am struck by the endless challenge of arts managers to balance the tensions of time. All of us — journalists, managers, citizens, governments, etc. — are increasingly driven by a decreasing span of time (the annual report, the quarterly financial, the daily box office). The greatest art among us has often taken generations or centuries to blossom and be valued. In many ways, the nonprofit tax status was designed to buffer socially valuable organizations from the pressures of immediate returns. That protection never really worked as planned.
I’m not suggesting that cultural facilities or cultural nonprofits shouldn’t be accountable in the short term, even if their impact extends over decades. I’m just calling forward the astounding balancing act required of our leaders and our organizations, and suggesting why so many struggle to stay on the wire (as they are struggling in Detroit, in Scranton, in Seattle, and elsewhere).
