There’s an article archetype in the press every few years, about how difficult it is to fill the top slot at America’s leading museums, and about whether boards should search for business leaders or art scholars to plug the hole. This time around, the article is in the Wall Street Journal.
In a nutshell:
Who should run a big art museum? Executives with corporate skills that could help them manage these multimillion-dollar institutions through major expansions? Or leaders with traditional art-world credentials?….
Some art-world veterans insist that running museums is not like running for-profit businesses. Museums have long been accustomed to covering their operating costs through their endowments rather than through retail operations or ticket sales. According to [Maxwell] Anderson, currently a principal in cultural consultancy AEA Consulting, the average visitor costs a museum about $80, substantially more than the typical price of a ticket — meaning that museum directors must spend energy raising funds to support a business premised on losing money.
With 15 art museums across the U.S. currently searching for new directors, the conversation is likely raging in boardrooms from coast to coast.
There are two shortcomings to this shorthand — the idea that business savvy and aesthetic credibility are mutually exclusive qualities that require a proactive choice. First, all cultural nonprofits are businesses…just of a certain kind. Whether trained or not, whether they admit it or not, successful leaders of these institutions have qualities of business leadership.
Second, aesthetic sense and sensibility are not exclusive to those who have followed the academic/curatorial track. The fostering/filtering systems of academia have certainly been tested by time (and haven’t always passed). But who’s to say that a leader who traveled a different path isn’t serious, thoughtful, responsive, and sensitive to the requirements of the art?
While it’s fun to set up a false dichotomy and to vigorously debate two sides of an argument, it’s likely more productive to admit that there aren’t two sides at all.
This is an argument that does not need to be. Building any business requires a creative sensibilitity that really comes from the same place. The challenge for the not-for-profit world — not just museums — is to define the unique nature of the arts. I have thought for a long time that the arts needs to study the for-profit business model — not to become a business — but because certain business ideas can make the arts more successful arts organizations.
Museums and other arts organizations need to know more about marketing, financial oversight, its patrons, developing its staff, not to supplant its main focus on the arts, but to build a more successful arts institution. The world is changing for us all and the arts must adapt.
BTW, how do they get the $80 figure? Do they simply divide the annual expenses by number of patrons?
I agree, but I think it’s important to point out — and I am not trying to split hairs — that there is not a question of an arts organization becoming a business or not. They ARE a business. They are not a for-profit business, and put mission first in their decision-making process. But make no mistake, every single arts organization, big or small, visual or performing arts, is a business. The decisions that are made within that business are unique and unlike a for-profit’s decisions, but that does not make them less business decisions. Decisions made by a business.